Classmill: Create online classes with links, images, videos and files | Hacker News Reader

Classmill: Create online classes with links, images, videos and files

classmill.com

Good concept, but an unfortunate name. It reminds me of "diploma mill" or "puppy mill"... which indiscriminately pump out things just to make money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diploma_mill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_mill

Gah. Well, lets hope for the best! :)

Related, but without the stigma, would be something like classfoundry -- the .com is unavailable, but various generic TLDs are.

I think the name is fine if you turn your product into a whitelabel solution. People can dropin their own branding for their series of training courses and then charge a fee - all without having to deal with servers or payment providers. When I was freelancing a few years ago, more than a few people wanted a modern solution that they could whitelabel and not have some other company's branding on it.

As someone who's putting a class together right now from a mix of existing and custom content, I definitely think this is needed, though I don't think the site does a great job of explaining quite what it is. I noodled around with the "curated learning paths platform" idea myself, even :)

I found https://www.mysliderule.com/ a while ago which seems to be the same kind of thing - might be worth checking out.

Hi jlees,

Thanks for the feedback. Definitely working on improving the messaging. Mysliderule seems to be course catalogging of various MOOCs around the web. Classmill lets you create the classes yourself.

Sending you an email, please do check! :)

Looks really neat. I have lots of questions that I couldn't get answer on the site though ...

* What's the business model? Are they charging teachers / students / schools?

* Does it allow people to charge money for the classes they build? Or all classes are meant to be free?

* Would be nice to have a demo / way to see how easy it is to build classes, e.g. add content, create quizzes etc before having to sign up.

Otherwise, looks very promising.

Hey gingerlime, thanks!

Its an MVP at the moment, eventually the goal is to have teacher curated classes for very reasonable prices. At the moment its all free.

Will be having a quick demo up soon! :)

Cheers

You really need to get some of this basic info up there, I'm not going to sign up for something with no idea of pricing or commitment required.

We're testing various homepages at the moment. The classes are free to make and to join at the moment (with eventual pay to join coming down the road).

Thanks for the feedback!

First, great design! It's nice to see startups bringing good design to the ed tech space, I remember how much I hated the design and UI of Blackboard products when I was a student.

It would be nice to be able to check out class content without having to make an account. I also missed the light red bar at the top that says "you need to join the class", so I kept clicking on the button to open a section and thought the link was broken and just snapping the page to the top of the screen (as in when someone leaves <a href="."></a> as a placeholder)

Overall a very cool concept, and something teachers definitely need! Best of luck with it!

thanks primitivesuave!

Great feedback. The first modules are previewable without joining. Will be improving the notification views.

Cheers!

Looks interesting, can you talk about how this compares to the edx platform? https://github.com/edx/edx-platform

Sure. For starters, Classmill is not self hosted or restricted to universities - anyone can create a class on Classmill.

Classmill also does not rely on content production or live streaming video like edx. You can create classes with existing resources: links, youtube videos, images, pdfs, ppts etc.

Strongly believe that for a vast majority of learning requirements, the content is already out there. It just requires someone who knows the subject (such as a teacher or expert) to curate the material and give students the confidence in consuming them.

Hence Classmill was born :)

You can actually create edX classes with existing resources. The xblock spec is pretty flexible, and the existing blocks can be used with a lot of different types of content.

There are also a ton of companies that host open edX instances, which let you make your own courses. Several offer free trials -- here's a list: https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/wiki/List-of-Open-edX-se... . There's a nice open source ecosystem forming. I know at one point, edX was going to open edge.edx.org and let anyone make courses, but don't know where that's at now.

Your platform has differentiators from edX, but these aren't necessarily them.

Thanks for that. By that I meant that a regular joe teacher is going to find it technically difficult to use. You can run an instance of open edx on your server, use xblock components and point them to a video/audio file and build a course - but that just seems like a bit too much for a teacher who just wants to assemble a bunch of content.

The best solution here will win or even coexist; all the different approaches/platforms here will ultimately help the students win.

Surely you've heard of Versal?

I'm looking forward to seeing what Classmill can do! I've been personally thinking about these sorts of things too.

Do you have any plans for adding assessable items and making things more adaptive, or do you guys think you'll be more focused on static content materials?

Versal seems like a very good product, but also seems to be focusing on content authoring quite a bit. Classmill is a lot more focused on content curation.

Yes, adaptive/dynamic blocks are definitely in the pipeline as we improve the product!

Cheers!

Awesome! Great to hear.

I used to work at versal and now work for another obscure edtech startup - built another 'authoring tool' but our "blocks" are more like <elements> and we've got about 50 or so of them powering a poorly created k7 math course. These elements are inlinable in text and nestable.

It makes authoring a bit more technical, but we contracted our authors out, so with a bit of training, they were able to handle the markup-like input and not before long, one or two of them were asking me for features I had only wished somebody would ask for (the others just thought of it as a job to get done).

It's been my personal philosophy that tools like these ought sacrifice simplicity for power, as it should grant whatever zany ideas authors can come up with. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting this necessarily to you, just sharing my experiences and personal goals - and perhaps a slight suggestion to listen to your most ambitious users.

I'm a bit entrenched in this.

Nice looking site! I worked on something similar a while ago, but it didn't look nearly as good as this.

The problem I faced was in attracting users without one key compelling subject area. Saying "this is a platform for every type of class" is awesome in theory, but it's hard to find people who are just browsing around for random classes.

I'd love to be able to browse at least one complete course without having to login, also.

On a sidenote, livereload is still linked in your javascripts, and is hitting localhost. You might also want to concatenate and minify the js.

Thanks vikp!

Yes - good point, I suspect we'll be forced into some sort of consolidation or focus to sustain user acquisition. Letting the user browse more of the site before signing up is something we're working on at the moment. Thanks for the note on lr, plenty of (premature) optimization left to do :)

I love what I see so far. My school has recently ditched our VLE, and this is the type of thing I would recommend to non-tech staff as a replacement.

Do you have any plans for introducing tracking of student progress - maybe the ability to submit files or multiple-choice quizzes?

Oh - and the name is fine. Educators and kids will be much more concerned with content and usability - both of which you seem to have nailed.

Hi Marc, thanks for the kind words. Yes, currently you can track individual students completion progress. Tests, quizzes and assignments are on their way.

Thanks for the feedback! If possible, please do write to us at hello@classmill.com if you think we can help with making sure Classmill is usable at your school.

Cheers :)

Loved the idea, and finally a place with good format where to vert some knowledge in.

I really liked your design and UX overall, good job!

Update: Is there a place to set the module/class to "published" or something? So it's not visible until you are done with editing and such (like a draft mode).

Thanks lobo_tuerto! Appreciate the kind words.

Yes, draft mode is in the next deployment :)

I've been playing a bit with it, and found some rough edges, but maybe you are already working on them. If interested in feedback you can reach me via email (look at my profile for the address).

I must second the comment about the name. Most educators I know (and I know many) would avoid anything that suggests their work is templated or rote, and "classmill" kind of starts off on a bad foot with an educator audience. Seems like a neat project though, best of luck!

Strangely none of the educators we've spoken to here in London had that feedback. Will stick to the name and focus on building a great product for now. Thanks for the feedback!

A question for the site creator who seems to watch this thread : how would you compare classmill to https://usefedora.com ?

hey bpesquet, fedora focuses on creating classes where the teacher actually produces the videos and content.

Classmill is attempting to help teachers who know where the right content is with the right tools to deliver them to students - while tracking effectiveness and progress.

Hope that answers your question, please feel free to dig deeper if not :)

Thanks for your answer. As a teacher, I'll probably give classmill a try soon :)

How does this differ from traditional LMSes, like eChalk or BlackBoard?

Is it e-rate eligible?

Can I integrate it with SSO things (Active Directory, Google for Education, or Office 365)?

eChalk involves heavy technical content production and Chalkboard is a dinosaur and intended for in classroom use.

Classmill is flexible in the content required for classes and its intended use cases.

SSO is not supported at the moment, but is definitely in the pipeline.

I really like that high IQ people are out there disrupting education. There's a lot of improvement that can be made. Keep it up!

thanks mathattack! :)

How is it different from gibbon.co ?

Will there be an API to create courses?

Yes, absolutely. In the pipeline! :)

Awesome! Have an idea for a field trip app, and it could benefit from an API for this! :D

Sweet, could you please ping hello@classmill.com? Will keep you in the loop once the API is out.

I think even more important would be APIs to embed the classes elsewhere.

Great idea, thanks!

Simple, yet effective. Well done!

Many thanks, mgmeyers! :)

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