LearnAwesome.org

Topic page
Flashcards module for practice

Inspiration

The completion rates for MOOCs on Coursera / edX is less than 4%. In my opinion, this is because most edtech platforms create their own content and that makes them a poor content curator. These days, people learn not just from MOOCs and textbooks, but videos, livestreams, tweetstorms, podcasts, blog posts, interactive explorables, git repositories and much more.

What it does

LearnAwesome.org collects and curates learning resources from all over the Web with rich metadata. This enables two very powerful things:

Advanced searches like "Show me short videos about machine learning that explain it in entertaining and visual manner and is recommended by researchers
Generate an optimal learning path that adapts to the user's background, goals and constraints. If you want to learn Python, the path will be different for those who already

This is also a community of learners (similar to GoodReads), with uni-directional follow. You can see what others are learning and what resources they recommend. There is a spaced-repetition based flashcard practice module to help you remember what you read. There is a browser extension for making all of this seamless. There are topic-specific chat rooms for informal discussions. There are embeddable widgets so you can show off your learning activity on other websites.

How we built it

We started simply as a list of links in a Github repository. But soon people started asking for search and ratings, so we turned this into a web application. We use Rails and PostgreSQL with Heroku.