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.
Challenges we ran into
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- We already get around 3,000 monthly active users.
- We were featured by ProductHunt.
- Users have started talking about us on social media.
What we learned
- We need to organize topics in a knowledge graph or a conceptNet to be able to do more powerful search and exploration.
What's next for LearnAwesome.org
- Design revamp
- Curated learning plans for popular topics
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.