New Pilot Site Looking For Feedback

Hi All,

I've spent the last 4 months putting together a system for an online knowledge exchange & marketplace. My pilot site (v1.0 beta) is ready for testing and I was hoping you guys would do me the honour of playing with it and seeing what you think.

OVERVIEW

The system is setup for the buying/selling of knowledge in the form of online courses. Anyone can create a course and play the role of 'tutor'. Anyone else can enrol in a course and play the role of 'student'.

Everything needed to create a course is built into the system. Courses follow the course->topic->lesson format with unlimited topics and lessons per course. Students go through the lessons and complete them all to complete (and pass) the course.

As a tutor you pay (the site) to publish your course. As a student you pay (the tutor) to enrol in a course. This is all done through an internal credits system with paypal integration (which is not setup yet). At present when logging in for the first time the site will give you a certain amount of credits to be able to both publish a course and enrol in another to fully test the system.

If you are interested in testing out the pilot PLEASE send me a private message on here so that I know who has had a go. The system will be a little buggy here and there, but I expect 99.9% smooth sailing. This pilot os a concept test more than a programming/coding test.

I've put together (and putting together) some videos to explain about the site & system to help understand better.

I do hope you guys have a moment to test it out as I think the idea is unique (so far) in terms what is offered and how it is offered. In a nutshell, think about eBay shops (not auctions) but everyone is selling knowledge. 

There's too much to explain about here, so again, welcome to test the pilot and please give me some feedback (pos/neg all ok) about what you think.

 EDIT: A website would always be useful --> www.webcampus.me/www.upersonal.net ;)

  • ESTO es IRE, dícelo tu YASO #Ser #Ire #Loka

  • great idea but needs to be little more professional in lay out/theme and ease of access. Its success will depend on your target audience. If you seperate it for school, college, university students and professionals and put some kind of age restrictions for certain subjects like Adult nature subjects restrictions for kids.

    No offense please but I couldn't understand the need for demo course "understanding the crusades" ????. Students will be more interested in Math, Physics, Science, engineering and medical subjects or IT students in learning PHP etc. 

  • Cool idea, it's quite well customized.  Why are you using 1.7 this late in the game?

    I haven't finished clicking around, but I was prompted to look for friends - and the link took me to my friends page, which was predictably empty.  It should probably go to the members page, or a members search or something so that I could find friends.  The current destination is kind of useless until I already have friends.

  • @kashif - thanks for your thoughts. This project is not about academia but is open to all knowledge. Academia is included but other topics such as DIY, Bee-Keeping or anything is welcomed.

    The demo course is not a demo course...it's my course ;)

    @matt - glad you like the idea. Started this project quite a while ago, although this concoction of it started in last december. Started in 1.7 so continued. Shouldn't be too difficult to upgrade the plugins to 1.8 

    re:friends - yep working on a better ui for finding friends & searching members than standard elgg. Once done, I'll put it up.

  • I created a test course, with a lesson and an exam.  After creating the lesson and the exam I saved the questions but there was no direction of where to go from there - maybe a link or a redirect back to the course dashboard might be a good idea?  When I tried to publish the course it tells me I don't have enough topics or lessons, but it doesn't let me know how many it's expecting.

    Also, when I created my exam I added 4 multiple choice questions, when I took the exam there was a 5th question that was completely blank with 4 blank answers.

    I do like the inteface for creating exams though, it's quite intuitive.

  • @matt - thanks for more detailed feedback. I'll clear up these issues asap and look into FF issues.

  • Awesome, one more thing - I couldn't save an intro for a course.  There was no feedback - in firebug I found a javascript error "tinyMCE.get('instruction_text') is undefined" in add_edit_activity.js

  • yep - a known bug. An issue when adding a new lesson, but not editing. Will get it fixed.

    Other mentioned bugs seem fixed now, just working on the last one (clearer instructions after adding enough questions).

    P.S. I got 50% on your first lesson. Should've focused a bit harder. You'll notice the difficulty level is now 'Average' for that lesson due to the combined average scores from you and me. If you're interested further you can check out the stats for that lesson (as well as the parent topic and parent course) to get some detailed info about how people are interacting with your content as students.