July 15, 2013
The Course Content
Continuing to research some of the more popular online education sites...
This time I'm looking at the way course content is organized and presented.
DuckDuckGo (Nov 2013 - Present)
Front-end JavaScript development for a yet to be released project.
Instinct (July 2011 - Present)
As co-founder of this music education startup, I was responsible for full stack development (Node.js, Backbone, CouchDB) as well as all design / illustration.
The product fuses cutting edge pitch detection with attractive and intuitive UI, making learning an instrument easier than ever before.
Nate Westheimer said in The Verge, "It may be the most advanced JavaScript app I've ever seen."
60K+ users have used the product to take over 1 million "virtual" guitar lessons. We also received a great reception when we presented at NYTM.
MyDunkTank (2010-2011)
Co-founder of this creative charity fundraising startup. I was responsible for all development (Rails, Node.js, MySQL) and design.
The product provided a new way for people to solicit donations from their friends in exchange for doing crazy dares or challenges.
Tokbox (2011)
Built the open source Node.js SDK for Tokbox's OpenTok product.
PlaySay (2011)
Full stack development of the initial MVP (backend + web front-end + facebook/sms game) for this language learning startup.
Launchrock (2010)
Front-end development consultant for the first version of the product as it was beginning it's viral growth.
Navteq (2010-2011)
Front-end development consultant for several projects:
Navteq's Maps & Traffic JavaScript SDK
Mobile & Web SDK development for Navteq's Location Based Advertising platform
Location based Phonegap applications for Caeser's Entertainment, H&R Block, Sprint/NASCAR, The Pulse of Vegas
Continuing to research some of the more popular online education sites...
This time I'm looking at the way course content is organized and presented.
The course enrollment page is a staple of any MOOC (Massively Open Online Course). I've been trying to get a better feel for the anatomy of these pages.
Questions I'm trying to answer:
Which attributes of an online course (massive or otherwise) carry the most weight in the enrollment decision?
Which attributes do some of these companies give more weight to over others?
Which types of pages / layouts make the most sense to me as a prospective student?
Here's what I've got so far...
We presented Instinct at New York Tech Meetup last night. It was a lot of fun and we got a great response.
I recently migrated all of our server side Node tests at Instinct from Vows to Mocha.
I've been around the block with testing in Node, unable to find an approach that I really liked, until I started using Mocha. The elegant way it does async along with familiar BDD style syntax is really enjoyable to work with. It's made writing/maintaining our tests something I don't run from anymore.
Hey there blog.
It's been a while, but let's give this another go, eh?
Let's start over fresh with a new blog engine.