An educational platform for all. Idea and first steps

Hi, habrovchane!

Many, if not all, in our country are concerned with the topic of education - universities are sour due to the backwardness of the methods, low motivation to go against the established system ... And not everything is smooth with schools. However, the country needs to develop, and breakthroughs occur where there are qualified personnel who are hardly found by Russian companies during the day with fire.
In general, the trouble! The question “ Who is to blame? ”Asking is not constructive and not in the style of our team, so let's move on to“ What to do? ".


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There are many well-trained people in Russia who can share their knowledge. However, the ways in which this can be done are sometimes quite unobvious.
Suppose there is an Expert Advisor, he has sufficiently deep knowledge of creating web applications and can share them with the general public. He can go to teach in the university: this is good, but there are clear programs there, it is difficult to conduct a course on web design within this framework. It’s clear that we will have to work somewhere else to devote all our time to this activity, which means that the quality of classes will fall.

These thoughts have already pushed me to think about the need for an intermediary between the “students” (in quotes, as this may be not only academic students, but also people involved in the development of new skills, retraining, or just lovers of lifelong learning).
Having presented the concept a bit in the form of increasingly popular online platforms such as Coursera, Udacity, etc., I came across several platforms (Udemy, Docebo), on which anyone can create their own course, publish it and if they want to do it for money.

However, these platforms are not represented in Russia, and it’s difficult to find a Russian-speaking audience in order to share a course with it. And our own marketing campaign is too much for our expert.
There are similar Russian ideas, but they are mostly sharpened for specific topics: Eduson (business education), Photo school (photography and processing)

So, you need to create a platform for building courses without limiting topics. How to build courses as a whole is clear: now the video + tests live well, the model of online lectures + offline classes are developing (for example, Earlydays of Jura Lifshits ), but you can continue to experiment, there are many ideas.



At some point, I matured to take the idea more seriously and told my brother slavakrasil about the idea and offered to join and work on the project, to which he gladly agreed. My brother at the time of the second year worked as a Technical Account Manager in the system integrator, where Java came as a developer.
Now we both left work and concentrated on our project.

The idea as a result, we have developed more widely and at the moment have drawn up Studier independent educational platforms as a conglomerate (we pronounce “student”).
Our task is to provide tools for creating, publishing and selling courses:

• experts in the field and teachers, in fact, everyone who wants to share their knowledge in the video course
• training companies
• companies that train their employees and customers, as well as those involved in consumer education

The idea to go in all directions at once sounds very bold, and we understand this, so we decided to select some of the first and most interesting topics on the network, which we will arrange on separate platforms.
We also concluded that the launch of the platform requires the first content. It is important that it be of high quality and set the bar for future courses.

In the comments to the article I would like to hear the opinion of the community about what topics are interesting online for course buyers.

Now we communicate with schools of dance about attracting teachers to create content for dancing. In addition to searching for content for thematic resources, we walked around familiarly and some of them agreed with our help to prepare several courses on various topics. Almost certainly we will post them on the main platform and they will be available to users for free.

Now on the platform are preparing courses:

• “Technologies for startups” (we'll tell about the community a bit later)
• Two English courses
• Probability theory
• Autodesk Revit for advanced users

We will launch the beta version of the platform by the end of February, which we will write about in a separate post.

We are open to suggestions and ideas from our readers!
From corporate users, we are ready to communicate with training companies, training centers and everyone who is interested in selling courses.