Here’s an Update of What QuickCode Has Been Up to!
Hello! Members,
First of all a big thanks to each member of the QuickCode community. We very recently crossed 5,000 followers on Medium on the midnight of Valentine’s day or so we wanted! We were watching the follower number as if waiting for some selection in a sports team. The 5 K happened, but on the 15th of Feb, right after midnight of the V-Day!
Anyway, there’s another different reason for this letter to our community. The purpose of this post is two-fold. First is an information update, and second is a small background story of how QuickCode got started. In case you are busy, we quickly want to introduce you to our latest feature on QuickCode that is — The Learner’s Section. Second is to give you a small background story of QuickCode for the very first time. How it happened to start, the problem it solved then, and the problems we think it can help to solve in online learning space. This is what is helping us to evolve and shape the product.
Background- # 1 Product of the Day!
Quickcode first started as a personal collection of best online courses. Tutorials that we can take online for free during our Masters and jobs in the US. One would argue that why would you need extra courses when enrolled in a full-time Master’s program. But the number of skills needed for a job is a lot more complex than we think as students. More often than not, we would need to complement our formal education with additional skills and vocational self-learning on the side. But any extra courses outside would cost money. Even if we were open to paying, it was tough to decide which one to buy. And you can’t be out to pay for every small introductory course you want!
Free courses would help us in getting a feel for what we wanted to learn. This would help us take a decision before investing too much time and money in a particular technology or business concept.
We graduated and got into our respective jobs, I into analytics and Keyul into a software engineering role. However, Keyul, being the techie he was, continued on the initial listing as a side project. Then one fine evening, he released QuickCode on ProductHunt. The release to our pleasant surprise was very, very encouraging. QuickCode featured as the #1 product of the day and one of the top products of the week!
Keyul then pulled me into the loop again to work together. Since then we have been working steadily to improvise on the product. From manually finding the best courses, adding them on the site, to manage the product development, QuickCode has come a long way. And one of the things that have kept us motivated is the response from this community. So big thanks to each of you again.
Gradually QuickCode began to grow, not only as a product but with the daily number of users as well. We also started a publication on medium to inform of new courses and general tech tips on our website. Our publication also started to good response and continued since then. This helped us connect with our users and listen to their learning concerns. [You also submit your own article to publish with us here]
Top Issues Found in Online Learning
As we increased our interaction with our initial users, we figured two major issues in online learning. They are, ‘Organizing your online learning references’, and ‘Staying Motivated’ to complete a course they started.
Leading MOOC based organizations such as Edx, Coursera, and Udemy among others have regularly highlighted this issue. There are more enrollments each year since the first EDX MOOC was launched in April of 2012. But the completion rates have remained very low. The situation is even grim when considering free online courses. It becomes worse when a student short on money, tries to learn one concept from one source and additional advanced concepts from different sources.
We wanted to do something about solving this issue, and a stepping stone towards it are two latest features on QuickCode, “Collections” and “Learners”.
Now that you have had some background about QuickCode, let’s discuss each of the new features. You can visit any of these features from the home page by clicking on the respective options in the menu as highlighted in the screenshot below.
Collections
Collections can be seen as your personal learning folder on QuickCode. As the name describes, it is grouping together a number of courses and keeping them for one’s own reference. When you visit the Collections section on QuickCode, you’ll see two options. One to create your own new collection. This can be done by simply clicking the “Create New Collection” button.
Second, you can check out existing “Featured Collections”. It’s a curated list put together by QuickCode team for a basic reference on common technologies. The idea was to make simple combinations of the common learning modules that anyone would need while learning different technologies.
Below is an example of a collection of a ‘Full Stack Java Developer Courses’. Any can ‘Follow’ this collection and it would show up in their Collections list. Additionally, you can modify it and create your own Collection for the Java full stack course you want to design for yourself.
Learners
This is one of the most ambitious features that we have launched on QuickCode. You can land on Learners section by clicking on the “Learners” button on the menu and will be brought to the page looking like this below screenshot.
When you land on the Learners page. You’ll see buttons with two main functions. One is you can start a new course. Second is you can set a new goal as can be seen below.
When you set a new goal for yourself, you can be in any status. For example, you can define your own goal as “Completing Java tutorial in 30 days”. You can also select some default options like ‘Interested in the course” or “Completed Course”. When you set these goals, these get updated in your profile and visible to other learners on QuickCode. You can use this Learners section to see what other learners are learning. To interact with them on their progress or congratulate them on their goal completions. Given that online learning can get dragged and devoid of motivation, setting your goals and interacting with other learns would help with one’s continued commitment to learning.
You can use the Learners section to track your own progress and that of your friends or other members on the site.
One of the major advantages of classroom learning is consistent interaction and discussion with your classmates. Similarly, in Learners section you can follow people who might be studying similar courses like yours. This would help you compare the courses you are taking and the topics you are covering for any technology. The best part of this is you can also connect with them, follow on Quickcode to be consistent with their progress or have a discussion if needed.
As you would see, Collections and Learners sections are a relatively new feature on the site. They enhance QuickCode’s core functionality from being a provider of a course list to help you effectively organize, plan and progress towards your online learning goals. Though far from perfect at this stage, we believe its a step in the right direction in solving some of the major challenges in online learning space. We have been very excited while researching for and executing these features to finally bring it to you. We hope that you like them, and if there is feedback or new suggestions for us, we would love to speak with you.
P.S. Here’s a tweet from Keyul with an overview of QuickCode’s performance and timeline of achieving our own internal benchmarks.
Pankaj Singh
QuickCode Team
You can connect with us on twitter at QuickCode, Keyul and me.
