Great! Looks quite extensive and deeply thought-out at first glance. Respect for the discipline required to ship something like this by yourself. Keep at it :) Iterate till you win.

Some constructive criticism, if it helps: it takes a while to understand what this is. On the home page, if you can have two panes, some code on the left with your framework and output on the right to quickly get a grasp perhaps?

Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback. I'll see what I can do to make the purpose of the project a little more clear.

thanks for sharing! :)

congrats! :)

Thanks lobo_tuerto! Appreciate the kind words.

Yes, draft mode is in the next deployment :)

I've been playing a bit with it, and found some rough edges, but maybe you are already working on them. If interested in feedback you can reach me via email (look at my profile for the address).

eChalk involves heavy technical content production and Chalkboard is a dinosaur and intended for in classroom use.

Classmill is flexible in the content required for classes and its intended use cases.

SSO is not supported at the moment, but is definitely in the pipeline.

hey bpesquet, fedora focuses on creating classes where the teacher actually produces the videos and content.

Classmill is attempting to help teachers who know where the right content is with the right tools to deliver them to students - while tracking effectiveness and progress.

Hope that answers your question, please feel free to dig deeper if not :)

Thanks for your answer. As a teacher, I'll probably give classmill a try soon :)

Hi jlees,

Thanks for the feedback. Definitely working on improving the messaging. Mysliderule seems to be course catalogging of various MOOCs around the web. Classmill lets you create the classes yourself.

Sending you an email, please do check! :)

Thanks vikp!

Yes - good point, I suspect we'll be forced into some sort of consolidation or focus to sustain user acquisition. Letting the user browse more of the site before signing up is something we're working on at the moment. Thanks for the note on lr, plenty of (premature) optimization left to do :)

Sure. For starters, Classmill is not self hosted or restricted to universities - anyone can create a class on Classmill.

Classmill also does not rely on content production or live streaming video like edx. You can create classes with existing resources: links, youtube videos, images, pdfs, ppts etc.

Strongly believe that for a vast majority of learning requirements, the content is already out there. It just requires someone who knows the subject (such as a teacher or expert) to curate the material and give students the confidence in consuming them.

Hence Classmill was born :)

You can actually create edX classes with existing resources. The xblock spec is pretty flexible, and the existing blocks can be used with a lot of different types of content.

There are also a ton of companies that host open edX instances, which let you make your own courses. Several offer free trials -- here's a list: https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/wiki/List-of-Open-edX-se... . There's a nice open source ecosystem forming. I know at one point, edX was going to open edge.edx.org and let anyone make courses, but don't know where that's at now.

Your platform has differentiators from edX, but these aren't necessarily them.

Thanks for that. By that I meant that a regular joe teacher is going to find it technically difficult to use. You can run an instance of open edx on your server, use xblock components and point them to a video/audio file and build a course - but that just seems like a bit too much for a teacher who just wants to assemble a bunch of content.

The best solution here will win or even coexist; all the different approaches/platforms here will ultimately help the students win.

Surely you've heard of Versal?

I'm looking forward to seeing what Classmill can do! I've been personally thinking about these sorts of things too.

Do you have any plans for adding assessable items and making things more adaptive, or do you guys think you'll be more focused on static content materials?

Versal seems like a very good product, but also seems to be focusing on content authoring quite a bit. Classmill is a lot more focused on content curation.

Yes, adaptive/dynamic blocks are definitely in the pipeline as we improve the product!

Cheers!

Awesome! Great to hear.

I used to work at versal and now work for another obscure edtech startup - built another 'authoring tool' but our "blocks" are more like <elements> and we've got about 50 or so of them powering a poorly created k7 math course. These elements are inlinable in text and nestable.

It makes authoring a bit more technical, but we contracted our authors out, so with a bit of training, they were able to handle the markup-like input and not before long, one or two of them were asking me for features I had only wished somebody would ask for (the others just thought of it as a job to get done).

It's been my personal philosophy that tools like these ought sacrifice simplicity for power, as it should grant whatever zany ideas authors can come up with. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting this necessarily to you, just sharing my experiences and personal goals - and perhaps a slight suggestion to listen to your most ambitious users.

I'm a bit entrenched in this.

Strangely none of the educators we've spoken to here in London had that feedback. Will stick to the name and focus on building a great product for now. Thanks for the feedback!