The UReddit teachers are volunteers from the reddit community, not vetted in any way. You're going to get a wide-range of quality of instruction. Some people might not even know the topic they volunteer to teach, and plan to teach themselves as they teach others.

And it's a time-intense process creating interesting course content, and most people underestimate that up front. "Hey I'd love to teach a class on PHP" and then they realize it takes 20 hours a week to prepare each lesson... Uh oh.

Some things I'd like to see added:

- some sort of improved notification system for announcing new lessons and assigments and mass messaging your students. Perhaps something a little more prominent than the current OrangeRed messages? Having a separate alert for new lectures would be cool.

- a well written guide and list of resources for lecturers. Step by step directions on how to do stuff like set up a wordpress blog or a subreddit or even a dropbox would probably be a good idea for non technical folks. The existing "Help" link is broken, so I'm not quite sure what is offered.

- The ability to embed pictures, diagrams, equations and charts into reddit self posts would be cool. Markdown supports it but it doesn't seem like Reddit does. Maybe raise the character limit so that an entire lesson could fit into a self post on Reddit itself instead of forcing a lecturer to link to an external blog? Some sort of collapse and expand system on top of Markdown would be cool too!

I'd love to help with this.

The main complaint seems to be that courses get abandoned by the teachers. Given that everyone is just doing this for fun, it's completely understandable, but still an issue.

I wonder if this can be fixed by having more than one teacher to each course. This would not only halve the work each instructor has to do but would also provide additional motivation to stick to it. I know that I would be much more likely to keep on teaching a course if I knew somebody else was also invested in the projects--something like peer pressure, I guess.

Coincidentally, my CS department is doing this with real professors in some of the real courses and it's going really well. Having multiple instructors switch off and present topics in different ways is rather effective.

I certainly wouldn't mind teaching a course on something interesting that I know (a very narrow field, admittedly), especially if I had somebody else to teach with. Of course there are also questions about how much free time I will have this year :P.

Do you think that the lawyers at Conde Naste might have a problem with it?

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