Fwiw:<p>I hadn't heard of you until I saw this post.
I took a look at the website, and having seen that and read the article decided to sign up.
I was immediately prompted to sign in with Facebook, and I closed the tab.
I find this kind of reports very encouraging. I think the future of education is professors becoming free agents in a free market. Really, why can a lawyer set up his own firm or a doctor start his own practice and deal with life and death situations but a professor can’t just teach a few calculus courses without being affiliated with a university?
Can somebody please clarify the article for me, they were trying to teach people, non-programmers, Objective C in a week? I can't imagine teaching non-programmers 'hello world' to a well understood but basic degree (syntax etc) in a week, let alone in Objective C, let alone in iOS.
Suggestion: if the instructor can also bring in another knowledgeable person, they can receive real-time email/chat questions, and try to answer them, or aggregate them in a meaningful way so that the instructor can address them.<p>I don't know how well this suggestion will work in the general case because it requires two people who are capable of teaching the course, but it may help. Particularly if the person fielding real-time questions starts seeing trends.<p>Also, if you can't do that, maybe you could set up chats with 6 (or so) students each, who could try to answer each other's questions.
I have a feeling one of these sites (Niroka, Skillshare, Codecademy etc...) will be a billion dollar revenue school.<p>Edit: I have a former colleague who started his own SEO shop a while back. After getting tired of competing on price, he switched his business model. He now goes to small companies and charges a minimum of $1000/day to train employees on SEO (I have no evidence, but I believe him). I can only imagine how much money the above companies will make if they were selling course to businesses.