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skeeter2020last Tuesday at 3:27 PM3 repliesview on HN

I work in edtech and one of my teams is content creation, so pretty excited about this space but also very aware of the challenges and massive amounts of hype and over promise / under deliver. To assess I tried to generate a short (< 10m), one-video course from a YT video I've previously watched on a topic I'm an "expert" - after an hour all I see is the embedded video, the transcript and "generating content" dialog.

UPDATE: " This course failed to generate. Please try again or contact us."

I really like a lot of the components of your idea, but the execution is underwhelming. Right now it feels like you're providing middling tools for too many components without nailing any of them. Alternatively I could watch the YT video at all ready has a transcript, take notes in any tool, and ask questions to any LLM; the piece missing is context, so that's where it feels like you should focus.

Re: assessments; it feels like you're being distracted here; I'm not convinced that's how your natural target market learns in this modality. We generate quizes in our product, but it's typically used in the "internal compliance" segment - think mandatory training like food safety for food preparers - not the external (typically adult) self-improvement market (which is huge!). If you're going to do asessments you need a lot of non-AI boilerplate around tracking, validation and certification/credentials. My two cents: quizes in your app are a cool demo feature with little real value.


Replies

bestwillcuilast Tuesday at 3:38 PM

Sorry we're running into some rate limits with course generation but will be fixed soon. Valid points—will respond in a bit.

redczaryesterday at 3:31 AM

I’ve got 20 years of experience teaching mathematics at a community college. MyMathLab and it’s various clones are all terrible. My brief tinkering with this product has impressed me. Certainly it underdelivers at this point but they are on the right track as far as interface and usability. Don’t know if they can pull this off but being different than existing ed tech players in mathematics is a good thing since Pearson, etc. all suck.

demarqyesterday at 6:25 AM

Reviewing a service that didn’t work is like reviewing a product that never arrived in the mail.

Not sure you can draw many conclusions on an experience you didn’t have. My own two cents