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Show HN: A YouTube videos course generator (coursely.ai)

56 points by MO-379 ↗ HN
An exciting aspect of what I'm working on is that users can create their own playlists. For example, you can provide an outline of what you're learning, such as notes from your professor or any other structure, and the pipeline will create a course tailored to that. Since the content is highly customized, it will be relevant and high-quality, matching current lessons or lectures in school or university.

Initially, the pipeline also generated some teaching content using AI, but due to the risk of AI hallucinations, I'm planning to pivot away from that. The new focus will be on curating YouTube videos relevant to each subject, so the courses will consist entirely of expert-created content from YouTube. This approach avoids copyright issues entirely.

I'm still in the process of updating the code to implement these changes. The reason I'm posting this is to get feedback on how it sounds to you as learner. I'd love to hear your thoughts, does this solve a problem for you, would you be likely to use it if it just works ?

I'm trying to find a product structure that users will find valuable and effective.

The web app is completely free to use right now as I figure out the best model.

Thanks!

24 comments

[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 58.9 ms ] thread
voisin
I would get rid of the silly AI generated images for each course. I would make the page much more information dense rather than these huge bubbles (this might be only on the mobile site)
MO-379
ahhh i see, will do, I'm due for UI UX upgrades next so this is on the top of the list.
bdcravens
Are there any pages on your site that describe what you've written here? At first glance I'm not really seeing anything more than a catalog of topics, with no additional information as to what uniquely valuable.

This is a common pattern I see, where someone builds a great app but saves the proper explanation for HN. Often you could literally copy your HN description to /about to improve things immensely.

MO-379
What I've described here is what I'm shifting the focus to, right now everything there is general and generic, The next update will include exactly what's included above
primitivesuave
Incredible to see this posted today, as I was just in a long discussion yesterday about the future of AI in education. It's a neat concept but I think you're spreading yourself too thin on content, especially given the number of courses on the site. It might be better to focus on building out a core set of lessons for a targeted group of learners first. At the end of the day, even if you're using AI to generate the content, a human being needs to do the proofreading and quality assurance.

The design also has ample room for improvement - it's a bit hard to navigate the site and stay engaged with the content at the moment.

davidt84
What stops it hallucinating videos that don't exist?
MO-379
It cant hellucinate in this case, the videos are simply youtube videos all it does is generate for you the search query (which is very hard to get wrong since we have the context of what the course/topic/lesson is), all you have to do is click, its the same as just going on youtube, the value it provides is the convenience of not having to think about the query and providing many queries to choose from.

the youtube videos are normal youtube videos not ai.

knowaveragejoe
I really like the idea of this. A bit more information about how the site actually works would be useful, perhaps within that modal that is presented when you land on the page. There's a lot of context that I have from visiting through HN so it's not terribly confusing to me, but to a random person they'd have no idea what's going on.
tikkun
What is this / what does it do? I'm confused by the site and the OP :)
MO-379
right now its a courses site powered by AI and youtube, each course has an outline and when you click on a page you can 'study', the AI generates study content and tests, and performs a youtube search to find relevant videos that you can watch. It's an education platfor for...anything and everything.
honkdiddy
You're making the internet worse.
simple10
This looks promising!

For anyone trying it out, it seems like the UX is a lot different when you're logged in. From what I could tell, the basic idea is you can create a new "course" based on a description of what you'd like to learn, then Coursely builds a custom playlist and course tracker for you.

A few feature requests & thoughts...

It would be super useful if I could give Coursely an existing video or playlist and then have it build out additional topics and videos into the generated course. The ability to add videos into lessons would also be useful (or maybe I missed in the UI?).

A welcome / instructions video is probably needed to help guide users through the UI. But overall, I really like the concept of what you're building.

MO-379
This is so very helpful, your feature suggestions are obvious but I never saw it, extra pair or eyes are nice to have, thanks.
CaptainFever
As an impatient user, I pressed a random course (Physics), continued as Guest, then when I was told to accept a ToS and privacy policy, I just left. Too much effort to read the ToS...
alexander2002
wait you people read tos!
latexr
I’m not the person you asked but I do read the TOS and Privacy Policies, yes, and it has kept me away from several apps and services. Since you apparently don’t read them, you wouldn’t believe the amount of shit you’ve agreed to, including the collecting and exploitation of your data and anyone else in your home network.

There’s a popular TV tracking app whose policies say they can collect whatever they want on you, including GPS coordinates and ISP information, that they can use it for whatever they want, and that if they lose it, it’s your fault.

With a bit of practice, it takes less time and effort to scan those documents for red flags then it takes to read comments written in all lowercase with sparse punctuation.

latexr
> By using this site, you agree to the following:

> You agree to our use of cookies to improve your experience.

Pretty sure you’re in violation of some European laws, there.

TheTxT
It depends on the kind of cookies. As long as they’re just storing some settings it should be fine. However IANAL
AndyNemmity
The multiple choice questions were all wrong, having the same answer every time, having multiple answers to answer "the only one"