I love what Codeacademy is doing, but hope they'll be rolling out some meatier lesson content with that 2m round before too long. The entire venturebeat-post-worthy jQuery lessons take about 3 minutes to go through (http://www.codecademy.com/courses/jquery-and-the-dom/1#!/exe...)
I'm the co-founder of Codecademy - we'll definitely be rolling out meatier content soon. This is just a peek at what some of our beta users have created. If you'd like to create a course, sign up - we're rolling out access to the course creator slowly to make sure our content is all high quality. Let me know if you have any other feedback!
I've been watching Codecademy off and on for a while and I think your comment finally touched on something that I seem to have missed this whole time: you're not focusing on creating the content, you're focusing on making it easy for people to create and find high-quality content.
I see you have a signup form for course creators, but I'm not seeing any data on what exactly you want to focus on (is reverse-engineering out of scope, for instance?), whether or not course creators are paid, etc. I'd love to be involved, but just don't have enough information to go on yet; if you could fill in the blanks, I'd greatly appreciate it. Keep up the good work.
I haven't read a whole lot about your guys' operation, in fact I didn't even know the content was user submitted, but I'm wondering how you're moderating content for quality. I ask because as I was checking out the site last night, I was noticing typos and grammatical errors here and there. There are also technical downfalls, which are probably not as easy to fix.
If anything, a lazy way to get information on this would be to 'robustify' the feedback tool. If I notice a typo, or a bug, am I happy? No, not really. But I'm not confused either. The feedback tool should also act as a quality assurance tool IMHO.
We're editing the content in house at the moment. We react to feedback in real time so any bugs you saw last night have likely been fixed (we saw a few on the courses that were fixed around 20 minutes after the course was released).
Loving this product. Especially the fact that you jump right into a lesson when you arrive at the homepage. Deliver value before asking the user for anything. Awesome.
“It really takes people back to the exciting part of programming, which is building things, breaking things, and seeing how they work,” - reminds me about what I loved about playing with Legos, Logo and BASIC as a child. Way to go Codecadamy team!
I like the product, but I wish it was a bit more involved.
Right now, all you do is 1 simple exercise...and it's really simple stuff. i.e. they give you an example of how to use jQuery to change the color to yellow...and the "practical" experience, is changing the color to red.
I think something a bit complicated where you have 10 different examples for each step(progressively complicated), so that people would really learn this stuff.
Hi vaksel, thanks for the comments. This lesson is our "alpha" release of jQuery...we're working on more improvements (and supplementary exercises) based on your feedback. Would love to hear more - we're contact(at)codecademy(dot)com.
Why buy the .com version of their domain? Or, I suppose the better question is why go after their name to begin with? It makes you guys look pretty bad and a little of that smears off on YC.
