Tutors, Mentors, Friends — How One Startup Wants to Change Online Learning
Codingtutors is a small startup with a big idea: making learning fun and personalized again.
Today, learning is becoming generalized. The classroom has become a factory, using “one-size-fits-all” pedagogies and teaching to produce students who either fit in or fail. Standardised testing, KPIs and the mind-numbing mentality teachers and students are forced to adopt in response are turning education into an industrial process that creates parts, not intellects. True innovators, the entrepreneurs who build world-changing enterprises and startups or the political revolutionaries who effect change in the world, are many but still too few. We believe this is ineffective, and needs to change.
Founded by a range of professionals including Andrei Klauss, Robert Liow and Matei Rogoz of The Students Startup Ltd, Codingtutors imagines a world where each student will be the center of their own online learning experience, and teachers will teach at a pace that matches each student’s needs and interests. We want to create a revolutionary learning experience where One-to-One or One-to-Few learning is the norm, as opposed to the One-to-Many approach of the traditional classroom.
However, while we don’t think education should be confined to the classroom, we don’t think self-directed online learning, through resources like wikis and even traditional online courses, is sufficient. A student doing self-directed learning isn’t being tutored, and isn’t being mentored either; they might be learning at their own pace, but nobody’s going to be there in person to give them a second opinion, or an expert’s eye to tell them where they’re going wrong. Besides, self-directed learning is a lonely road; comments can’t replace the friends made in school, or chats like those in Slack channels.
We’ve come to a happy medium, a solution lying somewhere between the two: a unique blend of small, live online coding classes and interactive real-time exercises that bring Tutors, Mentors and Friends to our students. We imagine a revolutionary world, where students and teachers are directly connected, and learning is no longer trapped within the four walls of the classroom, and we’ve got the tools to make it happen.
At Codingtutors, our live classes in subjects like web design, JavaScript and Python will be in a One-to-Few setting, conducted through the internet; small class sizes ensure that each student gets the attention they need from our expert tutors, who are variously authors of books, creators of open source libraries and even engineers at well-known tech companies. Each tutor will be able to supervise every student’s work, through pair-programming as well as one-to-one mentorship; our tutors will provide mentorship and guidance to students during the live classes, and remain accessible through private messages for as long as the course is ongoing. In addition, the small group format is designed to enable students and experts to network, through in-class interactions, pair-programming between students as well as Slack channels where they can join group discussions, learn and make friends and contacts with each other.
Additionally, Codingtutors also offers a One-Month Startup MVP, for students to develop a single, real-world application: theirs. From learning the basics of front-end development to building the application and growth hacking their startup, the One-Month Startup MVP lets students train individually alongside a dedicated expert, who will deliver an intensive, closely guided crash course in building a startup from scratch, and send them off with an application that is all theirs. Think of it as a startup bootcamp, except conducted entirely online; there’s no need to travel, or even for a student to leave the safety and comfort of their own bedroom, to lay the groundwork for what could be the next AirBnB, Tinder or Uber.
Codingtutors aims to change the way we view online learning from the ground up. Our vision defines us: we aim to create a world where learning is Fun and Personalized. We want to create entrepreneurs and revolutionaries; we are your Tutors, Mentors and Friends!
