The eduFire Blog » Building eduFire

Relive the Glory Days with eduFire Class Recordings

Koichi — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:21:43 +0000

If you’re like me and you wish you had something to watch now that the World Series is over (and you’re also sad that the Seattle Mariners didn’t make it to the playoffs), you’re definitely in luck. We’ve been secretly asking people for permission to take the recordings of their classes and put them up for your viewing pleasure.

Introducing, the eduFire Videos channel. This page is full of our favorite class recordings, from Bert Sperling’s class on Sperling’s BestPlaces (who did studies like “Sperling’s Best Places to Live”, to Avinash Kaushik’s class on Web Analytics, you’ll find something interesting (and educational) no matter who you are. We’ll be adding new classes approximately once a week, so make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates right to your reader.

Although this is just a little taste of what’s already there and what’s to come, here are some of our favorites, listed in easy-to-click bullet format! :)

Or, if none of these interest you, be sure to browse around anyways. There’s a lot more, and we’ll continue to add content in there every week!

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Looking for a Lead UI/User Experience Designer at eduFire.com

Koichi — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:55:32 +0000

Do you want to change the world by making learning fun for students and empowering teachers around the world? Are you fanatical about delivering world-class user experiences? Would you like to join a small team where you’ll be the lead UI/UX designer working closely with marketing, engineering and a customer-focused CEO to create the best learning experience possible?

Here’s the kind of thing we’re looking for (plus a little more about ourselves!).

You…

Think in terms of tasks and users when designing applications
Possess solid HTML/Javascript/CSS skills and the ability to produce interfaces that are fast and work consistently across browsers
Have knowledge of Y! YUI Library (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/)
Have a portfolio online of web *apps* that you’ve developed
Aren’t scared off by code or the occasional controller
Are passionate about shipping products that delight customers and enjoy watching people use your product and learning from the experience (even when it’s painful)

Oh, and you’re looking forward to having a massive impact on the direction of the product and the look and feel of the site.

Us…

A small team of experienced professionals focused on doing one thing: Revolutionizing Education
Funded by a top-tier VC
Employ the “Getting Real” philosophy and engage in test-driven development and paired programming
Results-driven, we move fast and we don’t waste time with pointless meetings

Last but not least, we have fun, love flexibility and enjoy working on a revenue-generating product that already has a lot of raving fans (check out our forums and see what our community’s talking about).

If you like how this sounds, please take a few minutes and read the rest of our blog / manifesto and spend some time on our site. If this resonates with you, drop a line with ”eduFire Lead Designer” in the subject line to jobs@edufire.com. Please send us URLs of your work!

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Learn From Successful Entrepreneurs for Free

Koichi — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:34:04 +0000

We are so excited to present to you the eduFire Business Channel. It’s kind of like our language section or our test prep section except now we’re finally “getting down to business.” Subjects you’ll find here include marketing, entrepreneurship, business development, management, career development, and more! Better yet, to kick things off we’ve partnered with twenty entrepreneurs (and growing) who will share their stories and strategies of success with you. Don’t miss out on their classes. There are several up in the business listings already and more to come soon. Here is a sampling of some of the classes available right now.

A lot of the classes are free, so there’s no excuse not to sign up (unless the class fills up first, hurry!). There are, however, a growing number of SuperPass classes also available in the business category. By signing up for SuperPass, you would get access to all of these and more (every single SuperPass class in every category is free with a subscription). Here are a few more business classes to take a look at.

If there’s one thing we’re really excited about, it’s the fact that we’re helping people become entrepreneurs. We’re helping people gain the insight they need to get a job, start a company, or do something remarkable. You won’t find a more passionate and experienced group of successful professionals ready to show you how they did it. Do not miss out on this opportunity!

As Jon said, “Entrepreneurship is the engine that drives innovation and gives all us awesome stuff that makes our lives better like Google, Twitter, Facebook, ZipCar, Mint.com and Scribd (and thousands of other amazing companies). By helping each other out and teaching each other from our knowledge I truly feel we can change the world. If eduFire could play a small role in that I’d be incredibly happy.”

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Finding a class just got easier

Koichi — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:23:08 +0000

eduFire just rolled out a new classes page, and we think you’ll really like it. We’ve added a lot of organizational bits and pieces, cleaned things up, and improved the individual classes pages (and how you create them). Of course, we’d love your continued feedback for future version 2.1. Our community members have been posting their suggestions here. So what new features do you get in Classes 2.0?

Classes Page

Featured Classes: It looks like featured classes are still being added up (only one right there now), but this will be a really powerful widget. We hope it will help you find some great classes to take (perhaps with your SuperPass subscription?)!

Your Friends are attending: Learning alone isn’t very fun, so now you can know some of the classes that your friends are taking (so you can join in!). Make sure you friend people you like so you can enjoy their company in a class later on!

More Organization: Now you can sort by All Classes, SuperPass Classes, and Free Classes (not to mention cycling down to starting soonest, alphabetical, recently added, and popular). We also added the most popular categories to the left to help you find what you’re looking for even easier.

Class Creation Page

We’ve also made a lot of changes to the class-creation page. We’ve added a few things (and removed some as well) to help you write a great description and really optimize the class that potential students see.

About this class, Prerequisites, & Syllabus: One of the things we found was that without much direction, a lot of teachers don’t describe their class very much (which contributes to a low attendance rate). We want to make sure we give teachers the tools and guidance to write a great description, so we’ve added the “prerequisites” and “syllabus” sections. Make sure to fill these out to give your students an accurate expectation on what they’re learning in your class!

Removed the “Recording / Not Recording” Choice: We decided to take this out and just make all classes available to those thirteen and up. So, record away! This is nice for students who want to go back and re-watch your amazing class!

Individual Class Page

There’s also been a lot of changes to the individual class pages. We decided to switch to a tabbed interface to help organize all the information.

Class Description: This is where we added the syllabus and prerequisite stuff. We’re hoping to see some nice descriptions here!

About Teacher: Now students can learn more about the person teaching the class, right from the individual class page!

Class Schedule: We’ve made a few tweaks to make it easier to see the schedule and where the class is at.

Reviews: Now it’s even more important to clone classes you’re teaching more than once! Reviews get their own tab, so now you can see what people have said about previous version of the same class.

What this teacher is also teaching: There is a list of the classes that the teacher is also teaching in the right sidebar. If you like a particular teacher, this is a great way to see what else you can take from them!

Please feel free to leave your feedback so we can continue to improve. We hope you like the new classes layout!

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Unlimited classes for less than $1 a day

Koichi — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:52:07 +0000

We think that the opportunity to change education is huge. Our ultimate goal, which we pound into ourselves, is to “revolutionize education.” We want to change the way people learn, all over the world, and make it easy and affordable to do so. Today we introduce what we think this is the first step towards achieving that goal: eduFire SuperPass.

We’ve been working on this for a long time now (thank you testers!) and we’re really excited to be able to share this with you today. Unlimited classes for only $29 a month (that’s less than $1 a day!).

World class teachers will become available to anyone anywhere in the world as long as they have an internet connection. Teachers, we believe, will be able to make more money this way too, since they’ll have more students in their classes. More students will have access to the best teachers in the world, to native speakers of the language they want to learn, and to experts in niche subjects unavailable in the places they’re living.

But we need your help. If you want to sign up and try it out for only $1 this first week, then we’d love to hear your feedback on the experience. If you don’t want to sign up, please send me an e-mail telling me what improvements you would need to see before you yourself made the plunge, even if you’d never ever join. Either way, we’d really love to hear your feedback so that we can improve on the overall experience! I appreciate it!

An iPhone 3GS for one lucky subscriber

Apple announced their third generation iPhone, slated to come out on July 19, 2009. We’ll be giving away a $200 Apple gift card to one lucky subscriber on that date. So, if you’d like to get in on the raffle, sign up before then! Of course, the gift card can be used on anything you’d like in the Apple store, and we won’t be paying for the monthly bills that cell phone carriers tend to have with them.

Thank you all so much for your support. We are really looking forward to doing this with you, changing the world one day at a time.

Update: We’ve extended the contest by a few days and will be announcing the winner of the iPhone 3GS on Monday, June 22nd. Good luck!

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Who doesn’t like Pirate Badges?

Koichi — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:42:42 +0000

Yum, I love badges. Who doesn’t? We’ve added a few badges to reflect some new features (such as articles and documents), but also added a few “challenge badges” as well. The “challenge badges” should be really difficult to attain, and I think the first person to get one of these (500 classes taught or 1000 classes taken) will be rewarded with a special prize. I wonder how long it will take? Six months? A year? Only time will tell.

Also, you may run into some secret badges while bumping around eduFire. Let us know in the forums if you find any!

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Happy Birthday eduFire! Take a Class on Us

Koichi — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:16:20 +0000

Wow. We’re one year old (as in, one year since we came out of beta). Do any of you remember our first baby steps? Well, now it’s time to learn how to run.

We’ve come a really long way in the last year. We added group classes of up to 100 people, introduced the idea board, given you the ability to upload docs / write articles, and so much more. When you look back on it this way, it’s amazing how much has changed!

Take a Class, Get a Class for Free!

To celebrate, we want to give you the opportunity over the next few days to take a group class, then get another one (at equal or lesser value) free. All you have to do is take a class before June 1st (hurry!), send your invoice to koichi@edufire.com, and you’ll get a coupon code to take another class in return!

Thank you all for a wonderful year! We look forward to many more!

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Upload Documents to Increase your Teaching Credibility

Koichi — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:40:29 +0000

Last week, we gave you the ability to write articles, and share your knowledge with the rest of the world. We’ve already seen five articles surpass 1000 views , and two get over 10,000!

In addition to writing your own articles, now you have the ability to upload documents. PDFs, PowerPoints, docs, you name it. And, just like articles, if you have a class scheduled, you can associate it with that class, so all your documents are stored in one place making it easy for the students to access them.

Here are some benefits to uploading your documents.

Ability to associate a document with a class, so your students can read up and prepare for your classes.
Google Search traffic. This means people will find your documents via Google, thus finding you as well.
Builds Credibility: A teacher with good content coming from their account means they’re a good teacher as well. Just one more thing teachers can use to stand out from the crowd.

If you’ve taught any classes in the past, and have a PowerPoint / PDF / anything you want to upload, here’s the link. First document to hit 1,000 views gets an eduFire T-shirt! :)

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We need an intern (or two… or three)

Koichi — Thu, 14 May 2009 01:28:11 +0000

eduFire is looking to get some summer interns. Interns will get everyone coffee, do push ups, and… wait, not quite. Here’s really why you should be an intern here:

#1 – Work alongside some sharp people and learn a *ton*. Trust me on this one, you’ll probably receive an MBA’s worth of education in a single summer (and this is coming from someone who received an MBA from a Top 10 school).

#2 – A great name on your resume. We’re funded by a Sand Hill Road VC so you’ll have a good name to add to your resume. Can’t hurt in this economy!

#3 – Super convenient! We’re located in SOMA in SF, incredibly close to Cal-Train and a # of bus lines and walking distance from BART. A great commute for anyone in the Bay Area.

#4 – Free eduFire classes, tutoring sessions, etc. If you’re looking to learn a language, prep for an exam, etc. we’ll hook you up with vouchers to take free classes and tutoring sessions on our site. Not a bad perk!!

#5 – Meaningful work. If you’ve read our blog you know that we’re about trying to change education for the better. What could be a better use of your time between school years than trying to make the education system itself a little bit (or a lot!) better?

We’re mostly looking for people who are local (San Francisco) although we might hire an exceptional candidate who is remote. We’re looking for all sorts of backgrounds but the ideal for us would be people with experience in marketing (especially social media) and customer experience (especially usability). If you feel you might fit the bill shoot an email and a resume to koichi@edufire.com and title it “eduFire Summer Internship”.

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Use eduFire Articles to Find Students, Gain Credibility

Koichi — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:24:37 +0000

eduFire has released a new feature for teachers (and students, should they want to use it) called “Articles,” which is part of a new “content” category that will have other features in the future. Actually, articles has been up for a few weeks now (how many of you came across it? I know our awesome Tagalog tutor Katherine noticed it).

When you write a quality article, it does a lot of good things for you, the teacher. It’s just another way to promote yourself and help students to find you! Let me list some of my favorite things:

Gain Credibility: If you write good stuff, people will notice! The more good articles you have, the more a potential student might trust you! People will read them and say “Wow, this teacher is one smart frood! I want to take lessons from this person.”
Attract Students: When you write an article, it becomes available all over the web. People from outside of eduFire can find those articles when they’re searching on Google, using StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. If you wrote an amazing article, who knows how many people will view it and then maybe even book a lesson with you! Check out this article: “Unconventional Ways to ACE any job interview.” It has over 25,000 views already!
Show the World Who You Are: By writing articles, you’re giving insight into the way you think, the type of person you are, and so much more. These are all things that are hard to do in your profile alone. For example, if I looked at this article, I’d know that Stephen is an inspiring and positive guy! It would be more difficult to gather that just from the profile itself.
Promote Your Classes: When you write an article, you have the option to associate your article with one of your upcoming group classes. The article will show up in your class listing, and there will be a link to your class from your article as well (so all the people finding it from other places can find your class as well). This is also a great way to add some information, back story, and so on to your class, which you can assign to the people taking it.

Since we’ve (officially) just released this feature today, we’ll be announcing a contest to go along with it very soon. All articles written before the contest is announced will automatically be entered, of course, so feel free to get your thinking caps on. Aw heck, I’ll tell you what the contest is so you faithful blog readers can get a head start. All of you will be nominating your favorite language, test-prep, and “other” articles in a few weeks, then those will be voted on by the community (as well) to see who’s top dog. Prizes are pretty awesome, totaling to around $75 in value for each winner. To join in, all you have to do is write an article!

I’m really looking forward to reading your articles – there have already been a lot of really good ones that I’ve enjoyed so far. The eduFire community is full of really really really smart people, and I’m excited that you now have another way to share your knowledge with the rest of the world!

[image source]

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