I'm looking for a senior engineer to take ownership (from me) of Class Central's codebase and infrastructure.
We help tens of millions of learners find the best courses on any subject. Small team (6 people), profitable, independent, and around for 13+ years. No VC drama, just sustainable growth.
Stack: PHP 8+, Symfony 7+, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Google Cloud. We keep it simple and productive.
Own the full stack, help shape our product, and build pragmatic solutions for our current scale. I am looking for product-minded engineers who are focused on user experience and driven to understand the business.
I'm building a new cross-functional product team from scratch (engineering, product, design). Looking for a foundational engineer who can mentor, collaborate, and help define how we work together.
Remote-first, async, very few meetings. Real autonomy, real impact. Fair warning: being fully remote means no annual Halloween Heists.
While I don't have a formal job post up yet, if you're at that point where this feels like the right next step, I'd be happy to hear from you: careers@classcentral.com
Class Central | Developer Education Specialist (Course Guide Author) | Remote (Global) | Full-time |
We’re the most popular search engine for online courses, and we’re hiring a deeply technical writer-researcher to help learners master tech skills by testing advanced courses and publishing “best course” guides.
You’ll: research, test, and evaluate courses (e.g., LangChain, DevSecOps, Nginx, pen-testing) and write clear, actionable guides with charts/images/layouts.
You are: a curious polyglot learner and clear writer, fluent with the command line, and comfortable driving projects in a remote team.
How we work: full-time, remote-first, async, very few meetings; we’re profitable and independent so you can ship fast and have real impact.
AI policy: AI can speed you up, but this is hands-on research and writing—you find and test the best courses yourself (not a prompt-engineering role).
Process: application review → paid writing test → interview with founder → paid trial → decision.
If anybody is interested, last year I wrote a detailed report [1] on Coursera's monetization journey. I describe the steps and experiments the company did to go from zero to $100+ million in revenues (and potentially over $200 million this year).
In my opinion, of all the online education providers Coursera grew the most during the pandemic. They also reacted well by offering free certificates and giving free access to their catalog to college students [2].
My company Class Central [3], a Tripadvisor for online education grew a lot during the pandemic. In the second half of March, we received 5 million visitors, almost a 20x increase. Though no longer the peak, we are still at 2.5X of what we were before.
Makes sense since B2B is an extension of their B2C catalog. But they seem to be hiring a lot of sales people, so I was not sure if they are profitable or not.
Not a huge fan of ads, but I would accept non-obtrusive ads in lieu of paying the certification fee if they wanted a traditional publisher revenue stream.
Yeah, the service is roughly $50/mo. There's no way ads could touch that. It might work in the future to monetize the older, "long-tail" content that is less relevant than it used to be. But even then, they'd probably have to cut the content, especially for cloud-related certifications, because A) the feature may have changed, B) I bet those labs get expensive.
The idea of watching ads in order to get an education seems like the start of some dystopia nightmare. Seeing kids in school buses emblazoned with McDonalds ads is bad enough.
Can you imagine wanting to check your answers to the work you just did and having to watch a commercial to do that. Probably reach a point where they'll require camera access to track your eyes to make sure you're paying attention.
It all depends on alternative. $100 is a lot of money for a kid in India, if the same kid can earn the degree while watching ads I think it does a great service to poor people because the alternative is not learning.
Alternative to a problematic suboptimal (according to you) school experience is not a perfect school experience but no-school experience.
American public schooling system has become a jobs program for adults.
Coursera has a financial aid program for this, and it is easy to avail if one is a student from developing countries or low income households. edX has a similar program as well, where the price will get reduced to around 1/10th of original cost. In Coursera, the price is completely discounted and you can do the course for free.
See: https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/209819033-Ap...
Spotify do regional pricing, the cost in India is about a tenth of what it costs in the United States. I don't know if Coursera do the same but I don't see why they couldn't.
Hello, I wanted to let you know that your HN account is probably banned as most of your comments are dead and the only reason I can reply to this one is that a mod undeleted it.
But if you’re going to argue that it does, that you’d send your kids to CourseraU, you are conflating the aesthetic experience of learning with actual learning.
Much like many video games, quite successful ones actually, reenact the aesthetics of work but are in no way shape or form actual work. This may be important for why they are an appealing product but don’t go and argue (as hardly anyone does) that League of Legends is work. That’s why it would also sound absurd to say Coursera is learning.
The University of Phoenix people are total shitbags. Charging for some shit certificate is a complete shitbag move. Just because it’s online doesn’t make it special.
In that sense, yes, expect that ads will happen. I think you’re onto something.
I had a really good experience with Coursera... In fact it's where I learned to code.
I don't think I understand the comparison to video games. Yes, sometimes games will simulate work, but that's not at all like online education simulating education.
It has its issues, but motivated students can and do learn online.
I like Coursera and I'm quite experienced. Their courses don't enforce the rigor of a college course; practically anyone could pass them without reviewing the content through sheer brute force. So I feel like the certificates themselves are worthless, but the actual content is good enough to learn from if you put forth the effort.
Huh...? Coursera provides video courses, readings, and quizzes. Is your assertion that it is impossible to learn from written material or videotaped lectures?
The two degrees in the articles are examples of "MOOC-based degrees". These are launched by MOOC providers like Coursera, edX, and FutureLearn.
In all 50+ such degrees have been announced [1]. ~30 of these were announced in 2018, but there was a slow down in 2019 with only 11 announced [2].
A majority of degrees tend to be Master's, but there are few bachelors. Most recently Coursera announced that their Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of London had 2,000+ students enrolled. It was announced last year and costs 10,088 – 15,132 GBP.
Disclaimer: I am the founder of Class Central, a Tripadvisor for Online Education. But we also write about the MOOC industry in depth.
One interesting thing I've noticed in a handful of the MOOC degrees (only a few of them at the moment offer this) is alternative pathways. I've seen masters degrees offer pathways for literally anyone, even with no prior education to be admitted into them and acquire a masters degree.
On one hand, I'm all for democratizing education, and have taken some courses from said programs individually (typically the offer a "preview") and from what I've seenb hey aren't something anyone without prior subjects knowledge can just fake themselves through.
On the other hand, a lot of the advertising from the schools themselves read like something from a for-profit and I wonder whether programs like these will weaken the reputation of the degrees or even that of the schools themselves. Paraphrasing something I've read on here before, sometimes, the degree is more about signalling than education.
I'm asking because there seems to be an extreme bias towards beginners courses, or content that is rather limited in breadth and depth compared to what a university might teach during a full masters degree.
ie, there's about 50 security intro courses (with lots of overlap of course), one "advanced" course that's been delayed for long and isn't all that advanced (Crypto II from Stanford), but nothing that even comes close to the various full-semester courses covering particular niches that I took in university (for example, we did one full semester course on each of: symmetric crypto, asymmetric crypto, side channels, "special topics" (random stuff), a cryptoanalysis lab, and 3 more niche things - and those are just the pure crypto courses, and even/especially within that area I feel I've barely scratched the surface).
These university courses cover not only more topics than Coursera covers (overall; there are many things even in this niche that Coursera has that we weren't taught, which is neat), but within each we went into considerable depth. In particular we tended to approach them from a rigorous mathematical perspective (number theory, linear algebra, statistics, proofs, etc). My worry here is that Coursera might be more geared towards people that don't need to learn the topics well enough to be actually able to use them professionally, let alone academically. ie, more like edutainment than education (no offense intended. I wasn't sure if I should include that sentence cause it might sound harsh, but I think it illustrates what I'm getting at).
We also didn't have courses that are blatant advertisements (#18568).
I don't want to put Coursera down (quite the opposite), I am genuinely interested in your answer - Is it just me not seeing everything available? Is the field I'm (slightly) knowledgeable about an outlier? Or am I missing the point of Coursera (maybe it's more focused on training industry professionals than academics than universities?) Or is it correct, and if so, is it intentional or unintentional? Is there a single field of study where Coursera could replace a university partly/largely/mostly/entirely? Will there be?
If you want classes that are more advanced or that go into greater depth, I recommend the courses offered by edX or Stanford-online or MIT OpenCourseware. These are full-term for-credit courses with video lectures at top schools that you can 'audit' for free, though few or none will grade your homework or projects unless you pay full tuition. By contrast, 95% of Coursera or Udemy courses are much shorter and more introductory.
I would expect people who take advanced courses to rate systematically differently from people who take beginner courses. For comparisons between similar courses it's probably fine, but would be hard to use the scores to compare the value of beginner courses to advanced courses.
Of course, even the definition of better here is so ill-defined it probably is of no practical significance.
If you want classes that are more advanced or that go into greater depth, I recommend those offered by edX or Stanford-online or MIT OpenCourseware. These are full-term for-credit courses with video lectures (MIT, less so) at top schools that you can 'audit' for free, though none will grade your homework or projects unless you pay full tuition. By contrast, 90% of Coursera or Udemy courses are much shorter and more introductory.
Oh, thanks so much for that! This link showed me I have interest for things I did not even know existed on the platform.
I mean, Mountains 101, Poetry? Awesome!
Thanks! We have scrapers running daily for all the major providers. The rest we collect manually on a schedule. We have been around for a while, so in many cases the providers or instructors reach out to us directly. Sorry, but it is not open data.
The slide says just that people have bought stuff they found on "Social Media". Doesn't mention that these are through ads or any indication of "Facebook ads genuinely add value though".
I'm looking for a senior engineer to take ownership (from me) of Class Central's codebase and infrastructure.
We help tens of millions of learners find the best courses on any subject. Small team (6 people), profitable, independent, and around for 13+ years. No VC drama, just sustainable growth.
Stack: PHP 8+, Symfony 7+, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Google Cloud. We keep it simple and productive.
Own the full stack, help shape our product, and build pragmatic solutions for our current scale. I am looking for product-minded engineers who are focused on user experience and driven to understand the business.
I'm building a new cross-functional product team from scratch (engineering, product, design). Looking for a foundational engineer who can mentor, collaborate, and help define how we work together.
Remote-first, async, very few meetings. Real autonomy, real impact. Fair warning: being fully remote means no annual Halloween Heists.
While I don't have a formal job post up yet, if you're at that point where this feels like the right next step, I'd be happy to hear from you: careers@classcentral.com