from Hacker News

Classmill: Create online classes with links, images, videos and files

by shreyakrishnan on 4/2/15, 7:31 PM with 44 comments

• by biot on 4/2/15, 7:43 PM

  Good concept, but an unfortunate name. It reminds me of "diploma mill" or "puppy mill"... which indiscriminately pump out things just to make money.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diploma_mill

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_mill

• by jlees on 4/2/15, 11:51 PM

  As someone who's putting a class together right now from a mix of existing and custom content, I definitely think this is needed, though I don't think the site does a great job of explaining quite what it is. I noodled around with the "curated learning paths platform" idea myself, even :)

  I found https://www.mysliderule.com/ a while ago which seems to be the same kind of thing - might be worth checking out.

• by gingerlime on 4/2/15, 8:01 PM

  Looks really neat. I have lots of questions that I couldn't get answer on the site though ...

  * What's the business model? Are they charging teachers / students / schools?

  * Does it allow people to charge money for the classes they build? Or all classes are meant to be free?

  * Would be nice to have a demo / way to see how easy it is to build classes, e.g. add content, create quizzes etc before having to sign up.

  Otherwise, looks very promising.

• by primitivesuave on 4/2/15, 8:46 PM

  First, great design! It's nice to see startups bringing good design to the ed tech space, I remember how much I hated the design and UI of Blackboard products when I was a student.

  It would be nice to be able to check out class content without having to make an account. I also missed the light red bar at the top that says "you need to join the class", so I kept clicking on the button to open a section and thought the link was broken and just snapping the page to the top of the screen (as in when someone leaves <a href="."></a> as a placeholder)

  Overall a very cool concept, and something teachers definitely need! Best of luck with it!

• by jasondc on 4/2/15, 10:53 PM

  Looks interesting, can you talk about how this compares to the edx platform? https://github.com/edx/edx-platform

• by vikp on 4/2/15, 10:59 PM

  Nice looking site! I worked on something similar a while ago, but it didn't look nearly as good as this.

  The problem I faced was in attracting users without one key compelling subject area. Saying "this is a platform for every type of class" is awesome in theory, but it's hard to find people who are just browsing around for random classes.

  I'd love to be able to browse at least one complete course without having to login, also.

  On a sidenote, livereload is still linked in your javascripts, and is hitting localhost. You might also want to concatenate and minify the js.

• by MarcScott on 4/2/15, 11:18 PM

  I love what I see so far. My school has recently ditched our VLE, and this is the type of thing I would recommend to non-tech staff as a replacement.

  Do you have any plans for introducing tracking of student progress - maybe the ability to submit files or multiple-choice quizzes?

  Oh - and the name is fine. Educators and kids will be much more concerned with content and usability - both of which you seem to have nailed.

• by lobo_tuerto on 4/3/15, 1:55 AM

  Loved the idea, and finally a place with good format where to vert some knowledge in.

  I really liked your design and UX overall, good job!

  Update: Is there a place to set the module/class to "published" or something? So it's not visible until you are done with editing and such (like a draft mode).

• by butterfi on 4/2/15, 9:07 PM

  I must second the comment about the name. Most educators I know (and I know many) would avoid anything that suggests their work is templated or rote, and "classmill" kind of starts off on a bad foot with an educator audience. Seems like a neat project though, best of luck!

• by bpesquet on 4/3/15, 1:43 PM

  A question for the site creator who seems to watch this thread : how would you compare classmill to https://usefedora.com ?

• by cbhl on 4/3/15, 1:13 AM

  How does this differ from traditional LMSes, like eChalk or BlackBoard?

  Is it e-rate eligible?

  Can I integrate it with SSO things (Active Directory, Google for Education, or Office 365)?

• by mathattack on 4/2/15, 11:31 PM

  I really like that high IQ people are out there disrupting education. There's a lot of improvement that can be made. Keep it up!

• by srkiranraj on 4/4/15, 4:54 AM

  How is it different from gibbon.co ?

• by thoughtpalette on 4/2/15, 8:24 PM

  Will there be an API to create courses?

• by mgmeyers on 4/2/15, 7:52 PM

  Simple, yet effective. Well done!