University of Reddit(ureddit.com) |
University of Reddit(ureddit.com) |
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.
That said, I love UReddit. Its a great idea. The reddit community is immense and there are a lot of opportunities for some really neat lessons that Coursera wouldn't necessarily offer.
A KickStarter-like system would also help in eliminating lurkers, and focus the efforts of both teachers and students on the actual course and assignments, and everyone would benefit if these courses are released for free after they're funded, but at least it guarantees an interested student base for the course to become a success.
That lines right up with the 1% rule- only 1% of users are serious enough to be contributors, 99% are just lurkers.
Basically what I'm saying is, an initial interest of 10,000+ probably would have made for a more successful venture.
UPDATE: It is working but it is sloooow. Getting hammered, I guess.
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?
http://blog.reddit.com/2012/08/university-of-reddit-explore-...
URL Blocked
The URL that you are attempting to access is a potential security risk. Trend Micro OfficeScan has blocked this URL in keeping with network security policy. URL: http://ureddit.com/ Risk Level: Dangerous Details: Verified fraud page or threat source
I remember trying to access it from work and it was blocked as well (I think we are using TrendMicro).
Anyways... thanks Tor!
The Finance professor is just right, I can watch the videos on 1.75x speed, and I'm finally getting the hang of the confusing, unintuitive and restrictive Coursera UI.
A 6 week class was effectively only a 3-4 week class. The first two weeks had embedded quizzes, and homework. By the end, it was watch this short video and no homework.
You should not proceed, especially if you have never seen this warning before for this site.