Show HN: Coursemate – connect with other self learners (coursem8.com)
Hey Hacker News!
My name is Collin, 18 years old and doing a gap year after finishing high school last year.
This was my first real project after starting to learn web development around 5 months ago.
I came up with this idea as it was a real pain for me to find other people from my country and especially my age, learning and taking online courses about the same stuff online. Lots of these online courses include their own discord communities and forums, but I still found it very hard to connect with other people in there.
Thats why I built Coursemate.
I would love to get your feedback on it! :)
80 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadMy feedback would be to show a lot more of the communities that you have, pre-sign up. There are a lot of people already hanging around in Discords or forums, and to try your product they'll need to see there's a potential upside.
So, letting me browse without being logged in what communities and how many people interacting in it would be a better way to entice people to sign up.
Good luck!
A small feedback, it would be good to also add courses from all over the internet, e.g. MIT OCW.
I recently retrained in IT and had to complement/substitute school material with self-study sources found online (mix of books and video courses).
Instead of teachers, whose added value was approx. zero, I would have benefitted from mentors/sparring partners prepared to do code reviews, architecture feedback,...
Keep up the good work!
As an older person in a small country, no results at all come up for me. I suggest a way to find people with different or no filters. Within 4 hrs of time zone might be a good one.
This will help prevent adoption stalling because people come in and see nothing.
I think the way to grow this is to set up spaces for popular free online courses and ask those coursemakers to link to the page for that course on your site.
I am on the fence about having a course-mate as I don’t want to slow down someone else (or vice versa), but might be cool to have a catchup with someone on a similar learning path for inspiration
There are existing groups, but what's important is getting to know people who're at a similar stage in their learning, and are open to really learning together.
I've quickly booted up a Discord server here, if you or others would be interested in joining (from any geographic region): https://discord.gg/Yeavn42fBP (provisional name: Explorers)
First, I think this is an example of when it might be _good_ to find people outside your "bubble" and just filtering by demographics works against that for no good reason.
Second, if you want to filter people, timezone as already pointed out, and also spoken languages, and maybe some sort of "pace" or "hours per week" would be more practical and useful filters that are actually relevant to forming a study group.
Say I'm a professional, I have money, I'm following a Stanford Computer Science course on Youtube or EdX, and I'd like to talk one-on-one with an expert that can help explain.
For language tutoring there are lots of services that'll connect you to an online teacher for a fee. What about for things like coursera/edx/udacity type of stuff?
In learning it's the same, you're creating the map in the same time that you are discovering it.
If someone would take that away from you in a sense you'd get very little out of the process.
Now with chatgpt et al. you kinda have a buddy system for stuff like this out of the box.
In addition to math I'd love to see:
-Probability
-Statistics
-Music (could have sub-categories)
-Philosophy
Great work still!
+ Literature/Art/Opera
+ Logic (technically a Philosophy subject)
+ Kinesiology/Anatomy/Bodybuilding
+ Biomed
+ Physics and it's supporting maths
Or non-tech topics actually, I'm self-studying art and finance at the moment, would be pretty cool to find people to connect with
Also just wanted to comment to OP that the site is really cool, feels quite polished. It's impressive that you're just 18 and you created such a cool and seamless experience. If you add mathematical topics (or create some way for users to add topics), I'll be a lot more likely to use it! Another suggestion would be to create some way for me to invite others to use the site -- some shareable link like "Join <user>'s study group!" not necessarily with that verbiage
Why make age a factor in the matchmaking though? I think it's kinda nice to connect with people from different backgrounds and (life)experience levels, so why "restrict" that?
If I want to chat with peers who are self-studying data science or Python or whatever, I don't care if they're 18 or 80. I care that they want to talk about Python or data science and are at the same skill level as me.
Also, there’s a social aspect of learning together and I’d rather spend time with people my own age.
1. You can't explore before registering.
2. The only tags are software development related.
3. The exploration/filtering by age or country is none of what I'd want to filter by. I'd only want to filter by "interest" (things beside programming, which isn't there).
With that said, good website otherwise - didn't hit any other problems and fairly straight-forward.
1. Level of prior exposure to overall subject. Someone who wants a refresher or go a bit deeper into a specific topic may not want to be in a study group with someone struggling to setup an editor.
2. Time commitment. Someone looking to spend an hour or two a week probably won't mix well with someone really committed to taking courses.
Your password must contain at least one symbol.
There are studies that show that that restriction decreases security, not increases it [1].
That’s all the friction I needed to not try this website which, from the outside looking in, seems like it might be amazing.
[1]: encouraging users to improve password security and memorability. (Yildirim, Mackie 2019)
But then also recognized "the participants in the experimental group spent time to read the information and applied the given methods to produce passwords, maybe just to help a research study by participating. However, in real life, users may not make an effort to read the information provided in the password guidelines unless they have to. Zakaria [64] suggested that one possible way to overcome this is to make reading and understanding the password guidelines compulsory before constructing a password." So even if we were to follow the findings here, the result would be to create _more_ friction, not less.
—
That having been said, friction is subjective. So we’ll have to agree to disagree about your last point.
It’s really nice to hear you are a self taught developer. There is a different kind of free thinking and creativity to solve problems that comes from your path that others won’t have, and doesn’t have to be understood, only experienced.
the site looks real nice. Congrats and keep shipping.
People who use it are the only opinions that matter. This site makes you someone who makes something people want, while solving your own problem as a student, both of which YC like if you ever are interested one day down the road.
Feedback:
Instead of age you might be referring to stage of learning (complete beginner, some exposer, some experience, intermediate, advanced, etc).
Uncovering another way a group of people like to connect and start learning together around those topics is really good. You might be surprised if you modify the age guidelines for the following reason:
- Learning with other pellets around the same stage in a fantastic way to support peer based learning where people are a little ahead and behind of each other and end up reinforcing their own learning by explaining things to others and helping them, and also being helped.
- Having groups with synced schedules is a cool feature. If you focused on students globally their schedules would be different from time zones. Since the time zones would be different, there might be an opportunity to just do it by stage.
- Self-directed learners typically don’t stop learning at any age, they are usually good at being beginners in any age of their life because there is always something new to learn, or to learn from scratch. It lightheaded be hard to imagine it but a beginner to Python at 40 not much different than 18.
- If the site focuses even more on communicating learning stage, and being especially for self directed learners (but all are welcome) that might prove to help get even more of the types of users you are after.
- I agree I don’t think slapping an external discord chat and forums on a course is helpful as much as it’s convenient for the course creator. Chat and discussion should be built in seamlessly like other things we use. Edtech is generally poor at mindful learning and user experiences.
- You may like learning about the difference between pedagogy (how children learn) and andragogy (how adults learn) pedagogy can wrap up around 18-22 and after that learning and coming back to it can be a bit different.
If you’re interested to chat, I’ve also been building online learning since I was 16 or 17. That meant helping design and build a platform to deliver high school, college/university and then industry education and training. I’m into video now as it relates to learning.
The exciting time for you is the time for change is closer at hand than it has been for 20 years.
If you like it, stick with it.
One quick suggestion is on the domain name. I know it's hard to find available domains these days, but you might consider "coursemate.chat" or "coursemates.io" (both currently available) or another of the new top level domain extensions. I think it would create a better first impression than your current "coursem8.com".
Best of luck with the project and congrats on the launch!