Thoughts on User Generated Content

A few years ago anyone could make and upload a course for others to use. The question is do you think it would be good to have this functionality again?
Comment below your answer and why you think it would be a good or bad idea.

Any ideas for how this functionality could be implemented would also be good to discuss.

1 Like

Hey Alex!

Here’s what I think:

Pros

  • Anybody can create a customized course, which would be great for teachers or meetups
  • People who are fully qualified to teach a course might not, because of the having to fill out a form currently and all that. It’s slightly intimidating
  • Kind of or mostly qualified people could collaborate with someone more qualified, acting as a clarity/typo checker - that’s what I’d like to do sometime, if I’m able, for web languages/frameworks and Linux related stuff (hint, hint more qualified teachers)

Cons

  • It would be very hard to implement, with the browser sessions and database stuff the new interface is doing
  • There will be a bunch of spam courses

So I think yes I want this. It would definitely be hard to create again, but I think that Codecademy could do it - after all, they’ve got eighteen great employees some (most? idk) of whom are experts in their field.

2 Likes

Hi, Alex,

A Github approach might be more fitting for user created courseware. I am not hands on with Git, but it’s clearly the way most collaborative, version controlled development is going. Well written, bug-free proposals could qualify for elevation to a CC github fork or some form of link in the community, and be elevated to a candidate level… Success at that level would then earn it a place in the non-track curriculum.

The larger issue as I see it is scaling. Within a matter of weeks this community burgeoned to over 100k members, a large majority (I suspect) just getting started on CC. How many of these would be eager to create their own course? We already know from experience it would be about 1 per-cent, but that’s still a thousand. CC is not equipped for that kind of load, as I see it, and is probably already straining under the cost of the earlier iterations of the courseware and site in general.

My two cents…

5 Likes

Good idea with GitHub forks, the major problem as you said is scale. And also grouping the non track courses so they are easier to navigate.