Interview with the founder of online courses Prometheus

Ukrainian non-profit project “Prometheus” appeared relatively recently. These are open free online courses, whose authors are teachers of the country's best universities, such as the Kiev-Mohyla Academy or Kiev Polytech. The list of courses is quite multifaceted: it contains both the humanities and computer disciplines. Three weeks ago, Prometheus began a crowdfunding campaign and already managed to collect more than it had planned . The co-founder of the project, Ivan Primachenko, agreed to answer the questions of Geektimes.


On the Internet, you can find quite a lot of online courses on various topics, including in Russian. Do you have a certain "killer feature" that allows you to choose among other similar resources?

Since the launch of the project, we immediately relied not on individual courses, but on entire courses cycles. The first of these, in the fall of 2015, we launched courses on entrepreneurship and civic education courses. The cycle of courses on entrepreneurship will allow you to gain enough knowledge and skills (from management and marketing to taxation and legal aspects of running a business) to open your own business or technology startup. A series of civic education courses gives an insight into how to make the country better and includes courses from anti-corruption to urban planning. Already in the fall of 2016, courses on programming and data analysis will be launched, which should give students an amount of knowledge and skills sufficient to obtain a Junior position.
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Well, the "killer feature", with an eye on which the project was originally created, should be the integration of our courses into a university education in the blended learning format. Already this autumn, Prometheus will launch a pilot project of blended learning in several universities of the country, including the Kiev Polytechnic Institute and the Ukrainian Catholic University. Instead of traditional lectures, students across the country will be able to listen to online lectures by teachers at Harvard, Stanford, or the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, while performing assignments online and receive answers on course forums. Offline will remain seminars and physical laboratory, which is unreasonable to transfer to online, the advice of teachers, who can now devote much more time to individual work with students, and, of course, the final control. The results of such a course will, as in the case of regular university courses, be entered into a diploma. The first MIT experiments with blended learning demonstrated fantastic results (an increase in learning performance by more than 35%), so we have high hopes for this experiment. If the pilot is successful, we will initiate a technological education reform based on blended learning.


Ivan Primachenko, co-founder of Prometheus

What is the status of the certificate of completion of your courses? If I mention it in a resume, how significant is this for an employer?

We deliberately refused to state certification of our courses. Today, when the traditional higher education in the post-Soviet space has largely depreciated, the best national university and no one knows the private “university for issuing crusts” have the same state diploma. What distinguishes them is the real quality of education and the reputation that has arisen on this basis. Therefore, we do not pursue accreditation, but strive to make the highest quality educational product and honestly earn a reputation.

On the other hand, according to our observations, certificates of passing mass online courses are gradually beginning to be valued by employers. Of course, several such certificates will not give you a job (as well as a diploma), but they can give you an interview and, in any case, will be an additional advantage when applying for a job. In addition, many progressive employers consider such certificates as evidence of the applicant's desire to develop and the presence of sufficient self-discipline for this. The main thing in mass online courses is the quality knowledge that you can get for free.

Your courses are free. What funds does the project have?

When we are asked about the project budget, we love to joke that Prometheus was initially funded from a postgraduate scholarship and co-founders' teaching salary. We are a non-profit public project, but, of course, we need funds to create new courses and support old ones. In this, we rely on donations from our users, grants and the sale of verified certificates that certify that the certificate was issued in the name of the listener who actually took the course. Right now we have organized a crowdfunding campaign, in which we are raising money for new courses and a pilot project of blended education in universities.

How relevant are courses to real university programs? Suppose that I want to prepare for the exams at the summer session.

Depends on a particular course. Most of our courses are abbreviated versions of university courses. Although, for example, “Development and analysis of algorithms. Part 1 ”is the analogue of the first semester of the course, which is taught at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. In 2016, we have already created and are planning to create several more courses that will correspond in volume to standard university courses, in particular, in subjects that are taught simultaneously in many faculties. For example, we have already launched courses on economics and entrepreneurship for non-core faculties, and also translated the legendary Harvard course on the fundamentals of programming CS50.

Very little time has passed since April, when you started this course, but perhaps there are some results? Listeners statistics, success, anything else?

We completely duplicated this famous Harvard course and launched it both online and on the basis of free offline training groups in a dozen cities. The course is not over yet, so it’s too early to sum up, but the number of registered users has already exceeded all our expectations and has exceeded 60,000 people!

In general, is there any statistical slice on the popularity of the courses you have? For example, the most popular are IT courses, followed by business courses, then purely humanitarian ones.

As in the West, our most popular courses are IT (programming, algorithms, software testing) and business courses (entrepreneurship, start-ups, financial management, communication tools for building reputation). Naturally, the demanded business English course. Humanitarian courses close the popularity rating, although even more users register for them than we could have expected at the start of the project.

Suppose I am a university teacher. Can I post my course with you? Are there any restrictions on topics (if the course is too specific, for example, general electrical engineering of specific units).

We provide our methodological advice and website free of charge as a platform for all courses that fit the format of a massive open online course, as well as the concept of Prometheus. If a teacher, company or university is ready to make a truly qualitative course on an academic topic - we will be happy to place it with us. What does “academic topic” mean? Let's say this: courses on astrology and traditional medicine on the site just will not get, although we have already offered them.

If I'm from the countryside with bad internet, where you can not watch videos online. Download video possible? What about the mobile app? Do you plan to introduce gamification or any rating of participants? Say, the top 10 best students of the course?

In fact, the popularity of our small unprofitable project took all the team members by surprise. No one expected that without any advertising budget, in a year and a half after the start, we will get more than 230 thousand registered users. In recent months, we have been too busy to cope with the need to scale up the project and quickly create new courses, so the large-scale technical improvements of the site were not discussed. In the next six months, we plan to launch applications on Android and iOS, make it possible to download videos with the standard functionality of our courses and begin the first experiments with gamification.

Is there any thought of combining with courses like EdX or Coursera? For example, place your courses on their site?

It is physically impossible. EdX and Coursera work only with universities that are in leading positions in world rankings and international organizations at the level of the IMF. Even if they made an exception for 1-2 Ukrainian universities, it would become a common PR action, because to achieve our goal - the creation of 150 mass free online courses, combined in cycles, the participation of all the leading teachers of the country from different universities is necessary. The experience of other countries (from Great Britain and France to China) confirms that having gained experience on international platforms, universities still go to national sites.

What engine was used to create courses? Open edX? If not, is this a self-written solution possible? How many programmers and system administrators are involved in the project?

We use the usual WordPress for the main page and open source Open edX engine with a number of our own improvements to ensure the work of the courses themselves. This is definitely the best technical solution for mass online courses at the moment - although working with it is not easy. But in any case it is better than investing an insane amount of time and money in writing your own analogue, which, at best, will repeat the functionality of Open edX. Moreover, Prometheus is made by a tiny team of volunteers - Alexey Molchanovsky, the technical co-founder of the project, is responsible for the entire technical part.

In online learning there is a serious problem of self-discipline: many people register at the beginning of the courses, and by the end only highly motivated people remain. Do you solve this problem somehow? You can give figures for any of the courses: how many people signed up, and how many graduated?

We did infographics based on the results of our first courses: “Financial Management” and “History of Ukraine” . In the world, mass online courses successfully complete about 7% of registered listeners. The results of most of our courses show slightly better results: 10%, but we believe that it is possible to achieve significantly more. To do this, we strive to break the video into small fragments up to 7 minutes, we try to diversify the standard tests and other “closed” tasks with interesting “open” questions and involve listeners to active communication on the forums.

In addition, you need to understand that the problem with a low percentage of successful completion of mass online courses is largely contrived. When, for example, the course “Financial Management” of a teacher at Kyiv-Mohyla Business School successfully completes 10% of students, it must be remembered that in absolute terms it is more than 4,000 people (more than 40,000 students are already registered in the course) - more than the number of students who annually listen to this subject in all Ukrainian universities combined.

How long does it take to prepare one course? Does the video fit into the lecture notes or does it exist as a separate product? Only one person is engaged in training - the author of the course? How is the issue resolved by the fact that not all people have oratorical abilities or, shall we say, a not very expressive manner of speaking?

It directly depends on the duration and complexity of the course. Simple short courses can be done in 3 months, while work on long, complex courses can take six months or more. Creating a course begins with the selection of a lecturer: we are looking for people who are not just great specialists in their field, but also excellent lecturers. We collect feedback from their colleagues and students, talk with the candidates themselves. Then our course developer, together with the lecturer, will create a detailed course plan. After the trial recording, full-fledged filming begins, where the director helps the teacher. In general, we are constantly improving the process of preparing courses, analyzing our mistakes, fixing successful findings - this is a dynamic process.

Is there a focus group for the course? Can I send my feedback? The course can be adjusted?

The ability to analyze students' perceptions of educational materials on the fly and change the course in accordance with statistical indicators is one of the main advantages of mass online courses. For example, a teacher can look at the percentage of successful answers to test tasks and see that if this indicator for most tests is in the range of 50-70%, then for one of the tasks it is only 30%. It immediately becomes obvious that either the questions in this test are not clearly formulated, or this topic was poorly explained in the relevant lecture. We are also now beginning to actively use small focus groups to prevent such problems in principle.

Were there any students who cheated on the forms of sending test results?

So far we have not noticed such cases, although, almost certainly, some users write off. In general, this is a rather pointless exercise. Any, even the most prestigious certificate in itself, gives people only an invitation for an interview. If the real knowledge gained during the course is not behind this certificate, it will immediately become apparent in a personal conversation.

How relevant are business courses in Ukraine? There is an opinion that the culture of management in our country has not yet reached the level when it is possible to apply global practices (this does not mean that they cannot be studied, there is no place to apply them physically)

Many of our listeners are business owners or people who want to create it. So, learning from international practices and innovations in business, they can immediately apply them in practice and contribute to the practice of doing business in the country. A drop wears away a stone.

Do you personally see any problems for online education in Ukraine? Or, perhaps, you know some specific moments of organizing such a business with us?

Mass open online courses are a very young format and, therefore, competent specialists in this area can still be counted on the fingers. And yet, of course, this is not the startup that will allow you to quickly discourage money and start making profits, so it’s always difficult to seek funding. But, on the other hand, as in most post-Soviet countries, Ukraine has ideal conditions for introducing online courses from the best teachers in the country: a huge gap between a handful of normal universities and the majority of pseudo-universities, as well as traditional respect and the desire for knowledge. And there are many more highly educated people who today are the main target audience of mass online courses around the world.