University of Reddit

The URL that you are attempting to access is a potential security risk. Trend Micro OfficeScan has blocked this URL in keeping with network security policy. URL: http://ureddit.com/ Risk Level: Dangerous Details: Verified fraud page or threat source

engtech2• 14 years ago

MacAffee thinks it's ok

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/ureddit.com

pav3l2• 14 years ago

Same here. I'm currently on a bus and it is blocked by WiPipe (category: Proxy/Anonymizer).

I remember trying to access it from work and it was blocked as well (I think we are using TrendMicro).

Anyways... thanks Tor!

thejournalizer5• 14 years ago

Can you access it through the https version?

pav3l2• 14 years ago

They don't seem to support https, so no.

unreal373• 14 years ago

So the number 1 complaint for this seems to be that most courses are abandoned mid-way through by the teacher for various reasons. If 80%+ of courses get only 2 lessons in before abandonment, this isn't going to really catch on as a learning medium.

The UReddit teachers are volunteers from the reddit community, not vetted in any way. You're going to get a wide-range of quality of instruction. Some people might not even know the topic they volunteer to teach, and plan to teach themselves as they teach others.

And it's a time-intense process creating interesting course content, and most people underestimate that up front. "Hey I'd love to teach a class on PHP" and then they realize it takes 20 hours a week to prepare each lesson... Uh oh.

QuantumGuy2• 14 years ago

In that event there is always https://www.coursera.org/ or https://www.edx.org if the university of reddit doesn't pan out.

dbh937• 14 years ago

and http://www.udacity.com/

xmmx• 14 years ago

Coursera is awesome. I'm 4 weeks into an introductory finance class and professor Kaul is doing such a good job of introducing concepts to us (I have no finance background).

thejournalizer5• 14 years ago

Unfortunately a lot of these points are correct. We set ureddit up as a self-service tool for the community. There is not a lot of incentive for teachers to continue on if their students don't show some sort of sign that they are still paying attention. If we had some sort of budget we would at least try to give them beer.

christensen_emc4• 14 years ago

This goes the other way too. I signed up to teach a course and had close to 200 interested students. I was really excited, wrote up a syllabus and a couple small assignments (15 minutes tops) and created a wordpress blog for all my lessons. I put a fair amount of time in it and got a lot of great buzz, but that was all I got. 2 out of 200 people did the assignments and I only got a handful of hits on the wordpress blog. Noone commented on any of the discussions I put up. It was really disappointing and I ended up ending the course early.

That said, I love UReddit. Its a great idea. The reddit community is immense and there are a lot of opportunities for some really neat lessons that Coursera wouldn't necessarily offer.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

2 out of 200 people did the assignments

That lines right up with the 1% rule- only 1% of users are serious enough to be contributors, 99% are just lurkers.

Basically what I'm saying is, an initial interest of 10,000+ probably would have made for a more successful venture.

beshrkayali• 14 years ago

Which is why I think it would be a great idea to have a KickStarter-like system to fund these free courses. As much as someone wants to share their knowledge, it consumes a lot of time and effort. It would be nice if teachers got something in return, other than gratitude :)

A KickStarter-like system would also help in eliminating lurkers, and focus the efforts of both teachers and students on the actual course and assignments, and everyone would benefit if these courses are released for free after they're funded, but at least it guarantees an interested student base for the course to become a success.

guscost• 14 years ago

Pioneers!

rmason• 14 years ago

It says in the footer that it is not affiliated at all with Reddit or Conde Naste.

Do you think that the lawyers at Conde Naste might have a problem with it?

skeletonjelly2• 14 years ago

The reddit admin team (edit: the reddit community manager) just posted a blog about this today. I assume that means they have some kind of arrangement.

http://blog.reddit.com/2012/08/university-of-reddit-explore-...

InformalRelief• 14 years ago

He does not mention that topic at all in the blog post.

christensen_emc4• 14 years ago

I wish this had a dedicated team of paid developers working on it. It could go places I don't think Coursera would necessarily go.

Some things I'd like to see added:

- some sort of improved notification system for announcing new lessons and assigments and mass messaging your students. Perhaps something a little more prominent than the current OrangeRed messages? Having a separate alert for new lectures would be cool.

- a well written guide and list of resources for lecturers. Step by step directions on how to do stuff like set up a wordpress blog or a subreddit or even a dropbox would probably be a good idea for non technical folks. The existing "Help" link is broken, so I'm not quite sure what is offered.

- The ability to embed pictures, diagrams, equations and charts into reddit self posts would be cool. Markdown supports it but it doesn't seem like Reddit does. Maybe raise the character limit so that an entire lesson could fit into a self post on Reddit itself instead of forcing a lecturer to link to an external blog? Some sort of collapse and expand system on top of Markdown would be cool too!

I'd love to help with this.

thejournalizer5• 14 years ago

It's open source, so you are more than welcome to. If you want I can point you to Anastas, the one and only developer we have.

christensen_emc4• 14 years ago

That would be cool. My email is in my profile. I'm sure I could help out in some way.

tikhonj• 14 years ago

This sounds like a great idea.

The main complaint seems to be that courses get abandoned by the teachers. Given that everyone is just doing this for fun, it's completely understandable, but still an issue.

I wonder if this can be fixed by having more than one teacher to each course. This would not only halve the work each instructor has to do but would also provide additional motivation to stick to it. I know that I would be much more likely to keep on teaching a course if I knew somebody else was also invested in the projects--something like peer pressure, I guess.

Coincidentally, my CS department is doing this with real professors in some of the real courses and it's going really well. Having multiple instructors switch off and present topics in different ways is rather effective.

I certainly wouldn't mind teaching a course on something interesting that I know (a very narrow field, admittedly), especially if I had somebody else to teach with. Of course there are also questions about how much free time I will have this year :P.

University of Reddit

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