Online Learning Platzi (YC W15) Gives You Useful Tech Skills, Not Diplomas | Hacker News Reader

Online Learning Platzi (YC W15) Gives You Useful Tech Skills, Not Diplomas

techcrunch.com

62 pointsfreddier19 comments

Hey guys, I'm one of the founders of Platzi. We've done classes with RethinkDB, YC partners, Sails.js/Treeline and Product Hunt. They're all free right now and will be for a while.

I'm happy to answer any questions.

hey I remember seeing you at noisebridge.net glad to see the company is doing well.

Awesome! I remember you too. Well, this is why we've been so busy.

Do you have to pay for any of the classes? TC talks about revenue but when I logged in, it seems everything is free. Am I missing something?

We started in Latinamerica and we do a subscription model. $29/month for access to everything. We have more complete courses, 2 weeks long, about design, marketing and programming. We're right now planning the first english course.

Which one would you like?

Any idea when the rethinkdb class will be available? I was tied up last weekend when it came out and would really like to check it out.

We had to resync the videos, but Monday afternoon, they'll be ready at https://courses.platzi.com/classes/rethinkdb-databases/

Do you know Cloudacademy.com / Codecademy.com / Teamtreehouse.com ? How would you compare with them?

I didn't know cloudacademy, cool.

We have livestreamed classes with industry pros. Among them, that I mentioned on the parent comment. There's a lot of real-time collaboration among students, like shared notes, questions and files.

But really, the live classes, those are our best feature.

CodeAcademy is a great way to build up some coding chops, but it doesn't give you the confidence that you'd get from hearing personal advice from the creator of a technology.

CodeAcademy is GarageBand, Platzi is MTV

Why can't you both teach me useful skills and certify that I learned them? Make the certification optional, for an extra fee.

I loved the startup class and sails js lectures. Looking forward to more in the future.

I wonder if MOOCs will reduce credentialism, or strengthen its grip...

(If I hear "You don't have a phd, you can't be first author on this paper" one more time, I'm getting the shark launcher)

In the tech industry (design, marketing, programming) we're seeing that companies don't care about credentials when they see an awesome portfolio. Google VP of People Ops said they no longer care about GPAs [1]

On the other hand, one of our students from Spain managed to convince his university to validate one of our courses as credits. So I don't know. But the trend is towards projects > diplomas.

(However, for papers, that's gonna take a while)

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman-ho...

That's awesome news!

yeah that's truly incredible. If I'd spent the first two years of my university education learning from a tool like Platzi, I'd be in an incredible place. Can't wait for @freddier to redo the badass "intro to programming course" in English so I can show it to a few folks I know who struggled to adapt to formal CS education

> You don't have a phd, you can't be first author on this paper

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that either you're in a very archaic field or institution, or that your PI is not a nice person. In the US at least, even undergraduates are routinely first authors on papers where they did the majority of work.

This was in tandem with a Canadian researcher, so maybe.

I suspect that part of it is that I'm not in any sort of academic pipeline (I got out of school with a BSc, essentially apprenticed myself under a nautical engineer for a few years, then opened a workshop).

If you don't need the publication, use that to your advantage: refuse to publish unless you get named first (were applicable) - the other guy can either accept or perish.

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