dhawalhs

I have been running a search engine for online courses for the last 15 years: https://www.classcentral.com/

The current catalog covers 100+ providers, 1000+ universities, and 250,000+ courses.

Originally a weekend side project that I first shared with the world here on HN itself on Nov 29, 2011 [1]. Currently bootstrapped and profitable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3288775#3289393

Class Central | Educator / Subject Matter Expert (YouTube) | Part-time | Remote | [https://www.classcentral.com](https://www.classcentral.com)

I'm looking for experienced educators, industry practitioners, and subject matter experts who want to teach live workshops on YouTube. We're launching an experiment: grow our YouTube channel by focusing only on intermediate-to-advanced topics.

Class Central helps tens of millions of learners find the best courses. Small team (6 people), profitable, independent, 13+ years.

This is genuinely experimental. You plan and lead live workshops on subjects you know deeply. Any domain works. We promote them to our audience, and we figure out together what clicks.

I would like to skip the content farm tactics and beginner stuff. I just want to offer solid teaching for people ready to learn challenging subjects.

careers@classcentral.com

Class Central | Senior Full Stack Engineer | Remote | https://www.classcentral.com

I'm looking for a senior engineer to take ownership (from me) of Class Central's codebase and infrastructure.

We help tens of millions of learners find the best courses on any subject. Small team (6 people), profitable, independent, and around for 13+ years. No VC drama, just sustainable growth.

Stack: PHP 8+, Symfony 7+, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Google Cloud. We keep it simple and productive.

Own the full stack, help shape our product, and build pragmatic solutions for our current scale. I am looking for product-minded engineers who are focused on user experience and driven to understand the business.

I'm building a new cross-functional product team from scratch (engineering, product, design). Looking for a foundational engineer who can mentor, collaborate, and help define how we work together.

Remote-first, async, very few meetings. Real autonomy, real impact. Fair warning: being fully remote means no annual Halloween Heists.

While I don't have a formal job post up yet, if you're at that point where this feels like the right next step, I'd be happy to hear from you: careers@classcentral.com

Class Central | Developer Education Specialist (Course Guide Author) | Remote (Global) | Full-time | We’re the most popular search engine for online courses, and we’re hiring a deeply technical writer-researcher to help learners master tech skills by testing advanced courses and publishing “best course” guides.

You’ll: research, test, and evaluate courses (e.g., LangChain, DevSecOps, Nginx, pen-testing) and write clear, actionable guides with charts/images/layouts.

You are: a curious polyglot learner and clear writer, fluent with the command line, and comfortable driving projects in a remote team.

How we work: full-time, remote-first, async, very few meetings; we’re profitable and independent so you can ship fast and have real impact.

AI policy: AI can speed you up, but this is hands-on research and writing—you find and test the best courses yourself (not a prompt-engineering role).

Process: application review → paid writing test → interview with founder → paid trial → decision.

Apply: https://www.classcentral.com/about/careers/developer-educati...

Good to know.

Makes sense since B2B is an extension of their B2C catalog. But they seem to be hiring a lot of sales people, so I was not sure if they are profitable or not.

I think their B2C business is profitable, but online degrees and B2B isn't.

If anybody is interested, last year I wrote a detailed report [1] on Coursera's monetization journey. I describe the steps and experiments the company did to go from zero to $100+ million in revenues (and potentially over $200 million this year).

In my opinion, of all the online education providers Coursera grew the most during the pandemic. They also reacted well by offering free certificates and giving free access to their catalog to college students [2].

My company Class Central [3], a Tripadvisor for online education grew a lot during the pandemic. In the second half of March, we received 5 million visitors, almost a 20x increase. Though no longer the peak, we are still at 2.5X of what we were before.

1. https://www.classcentral.com/report/coursera-monetization-re...

2. https://www.classcentral.com/report/mooc-providers-response-...

3. https://www.classcentral.com/

The two degrees in the articles are examples of "MOOC-based degrees". These are launched by MOOC providers like Coursera, edX, and FutureLearn.

In all 50+ such degrees have been announced [1]. ~30 of these were announced in 2018, but there was a slow down in 2019 with only 11 announced [2].

A majority of degrees tend to be Master's, but there are few bachelors. Most recently Coursera announced that their Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of London had 2,000+ students enrolled. It was announced last year and costs 10,088 – 15,132 GBP.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Class Central, a Tripadvisor for Online Education. But we also write about the MOOC industry in depth.

[1] https://www.classcentral.com/report/mooc-based-masters-degre...

[2] https://www.classcentral.com/report/moocs-stats-and-trends-2...

Coursera for Campus for the time being is free. You need to ask your school to apply: https://www.coursera.org/campus/

EdX also has something similar.

I would personally recommend Learning how to Learn!

Here is a list of all Coursera courses sorted by ratings: https://www.classcentral.com/provider/coursera?sort=rating-u...

You can also filter by subjects i.e Computer Science, Data Science. Humanities, Mathematics, etc.

Disclaimer: I am the founder.

A few reviews from last year's edition of Startup School: https://www.classcentral.com/course/independent-startup-scho...

Disclaimer: Self plug

Thanks! We have scrapers running daily for all the major providers. The rest we collect manually on a schedule. We have been around for a while, so in many cases the providers or instructors reach out to us directly. Sorry, but it is not open data.

You can find reviews for these courses here: https://www.classcentral.com/starting-this-month

It's the same list, but more comprehensive.

Actually, it wasn't generated by hand. I/Class Central generated it for OpenCulture. Here is a more comprehensive list, with filtering: https://www.classcentral.com/starting-this-month

The slide says just that people have bought stuff they found on "Social Media". Doesn't mention that these are through ads or any indication of "Facebook ads genuinely add value though".

More Stanford free online courses/MOOCs(over 150) here: https://www.class-central.com/university/stanford

The courses are not yet live. Meanwhile, here is a list of 23 Deep Learning online courses aggregated (aggregated by my company): https://www.class-central.com/report/deep-learning-online-co...

Also, link to Andrew Ng's original ML class: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

Something similar happened to me early this month. Embedly went from $99/year to $99/month. I barely use it for a few image manipulation calls.

"Tuition for the Master of Science in Product Management program is charged at a flat rate of $65,000 for the 12-month program. This cost covers tuition only. It does not include university fees, summer electives or other miscellaneous expenses."

Ouch.

Not exactly, a curriculum but we (Class Central) are publishing a six-part career guide that recommends the best courses in Data Science. So far three parts have been published.

Part 1: The Best Intro to Programming Courses for Data Science [1]

Part 2: The Best Statistics & Probability Courses for Data Science [2]

Part 3: The Best Intro to Data Science Courses [3]

[1] https://www.class-central.com/report/best-programming-course...

[2] https://www.class-central.com/report/best-statistics-probabi...

[3] https://www.class-central.com/report/best-intro-data-science...

We (Class Central) have been working on a Wirecutter-style guide on Data Science. Instead of presenting a list of resources, to try to recommend the best resource (mostly a MOOC).

Its a six part series, and so far on the first two parts have been published:

Part 1: The Best Intro to Programming Courses for Data Science [1]

Part 2: The Best Statistics & Probability Courses for Data Science [2]

Any feedback would be appreciated.

[1] https://www.class-central.com/report/best-programming-course...

[2] https://www.class-central.com/report/best-statistics-probabi...

The small infographic in the Economist article is based on the data published by us (Class Central). You can find such statistics and analysis of the MOOC space in 2016 in my article - Monetization over Massiveness: A Review of MOOC Stats and Trends in 2016 [1]

[1] https://www.class-central.com/report/moocs-stats-and-trends-...

We (Class Central) are trying to tackle this problem with our Career Guides. Our Data Science career guide is a six piece series that recommends the best MOOCs for launching yourself into the data science industry. Its inspired by The Wirecutter and we don't just give a list of courses, but also recommend the best ones.

Its still work in progress, but we have published the first two parts. Does this help? Feedback on the format and the content would be appreciated.

Part 1: The Best Intro to Programming Courses for Data Science [1] Part 2: The Best Statistics & Probability Courses for Data Science [2]

[1] https://www.class-central.com/report/best-programming-course... [2] https://www.class-central.com/report/best-statistics-probabi...

The title is inflammatory. This article is based entirely on how he feels from a 30 second commercial and his experience with ITT Tech. It has nothing to do with his Udacity experience.

Unlike ITT Tech or any other for-profit universities, you can do a majority of the Udacity curriculum for free. e.g For the VR Nanodegree (shown in the video), you can signup for the courses for free [1] and evaluate it whether the format/quality works for you. And like any other content provider, some courses might not be good as others.

I am currently doing Udacity's Machine Learning Nanodegree [2] and also did the first AI class from Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Part of the Nanodegree involves doing courses from Georgia Tech's Masters in Computer Science curriculum.

[1] https://www.udacity.com/course/vr-software-development--ud10... [2] https://www.udacity.com/uconnect/intensive

I think they start charging after the second course.

I am in the same boat as you. I am currently doing Udacity's Machine Learning Nanodegree. But I think I would have felt lost if I hadn't done the first two courses of that Coursera Specialization.

Just started, but it seems that Pandas and SciKit-Learn are very similar to Dato/Graphlab from a usage perspective.

For complete newbies (but with programming experience), I would recommend this UW Coursera course to get introduced to ML Basics: https://www.coursera.org/learn/ml-foundations

Early this year Apple acquired Turi for $200 million. It was founded by Carlos Guestrin, one of the professors who is teaching the course.

We (Class Central) are also working on a six part Wirecutter style guide to learning Data Science online. Here is part 1: https://www.class-central.com/report/best-programming-course...

Feedback would be appreciated (on the format as well as content)!

I just logged in to Comcast to see how much data me and my two other roommates are using.

The max we reached in the last three months for 342gb.

This article was written by Barbara Oakley who also teaches the most popular MOOC in the world and also my favourite MOOC called Learning How To Learn: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

She also a upcoming book titled 'Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential': https://www.amazon.com/Mindshift-Obstacles-Learning-Discover...

Thanks! Glad to know somebody finds them useful.