Everybody here is complaining about the money thing but I'm just bothered that the "platform" seems to be paradoxically...not programmable enough.
I mean, there's been a lot of criticism about codeacademy's populist ambitions lately, and the core of them to me is that you can't bridge regular johny's knowledge to programming knowledge by just presenting them with an esoteric text adventure in a javascript command line. People can't be so easily compelled to play text adventures nowadays, especially if the game commands don't relate at all to their everyday language and experience.
I think in order to produce succesful learning experiences for noobs, which is what they seem to be aspiring to (I mean, maybe Mayor Bloomberg has a hacker soul, who knows), you have to give them a real inmediate need for it. Like - when Myspace forced everybody to learn to get under the hood to customize their profiles. Myspace created more programming literacy among non-coders than I think Codeacademy ever could if it remained like this!
They have to offer fundamentally different ways of giving lessons if they really want to get there, other than command line games. Someone out there mentioned ifttt.com being a better way to learn about programming basics and getting people interested in the possibilities. I can think of a few others.<p>As I said I have not looked too much into what their lesson framework looks like, but if they offer a choice between js, ruby and python...that's already too narrow. If """we""" want to educate the general population about programming, it has to be way broader than that, and the framework that supports such education has to be more programmable
"The site doesn’t have any current plans to pay contributors, but to help incentivize users to write high-quality courses, Codecademy aims to provide significant exposure to the best lesson creators."<p>You should figure out a way to do this right now, you have a product that makes me say "shut up and take my money" and I have no way of giving it to you. Instead I give money to your competitors (codeschool, treehouse, etc.) for similar services. If you have already developed the platform to create courses open it up so people can make content and get paid.
"The site doesn’t have any current plans to pay contributors, but to help incentivize users to write high-quality courses, Codecademy aims to provide significant exposure to the best lesson creators."<p>I know Ruby very well (programming with it since 2006) and I have been professionally trained as a teacher. Yet "significant exposure" is not an incentive for me. I already have enough exposure to get the programming gigs that I want. My incentives would either be (1) money or (2) the joy of teaching. Since I have hardly any free time, my only incentive would be (1) money.
Disclaimer: I don't know enough about the legality/planned dev of CodeAcademy to know if this is actually feasible.<p>It seems like one of the best ways to compensate creators (and support another young company) would be to integrate the flattr platform. members, would create CodeAcademy lessons and at the end/completion of each lesson, users would be prompted to rate the course, write a few sentences of feedback (e.g. "What was the most interesting part of the lesson? What did you learn? What do you still have difficulty understanding?) and then are asked to click the flattr button and flatter the course author if they feel it benefited them.<p>Benefits include payment to authors, another metric to evaluate course quality, and a payment scheme that doesn't feel like it is draining your user's wallet.<p>Though again, I defer to my disclaimer.
As someone who is interested in crowdsourced e-learning startups, what are some good models for user-created content? Ie how to create the content, curate it, reward it, etc?