Project-focused house: Live and work with Alec on an online learning website

[alecmuller]

For months now I've been working on a website to help people train for new careers, particularly those focused on computers.  This site has a custom-built infrastructure, but will need a critical mass of content before it's ready for the public in a couple of months.  A beta version of the infrastructure is nearly done, but I need help with the content and would like to pay room mates for it.

412 Central Street has provided transitional housing to porcupines in Manchester for years and currently has two openings.  While porcupines who care more about other issues are still be welcome,  I'd prefer to start filling vacancies with people who are interested in working on this project with me and are as excited about it as I am.  My goal is to eventually have a whole house filled with people who share common interests in free-market learning in general and this project in particular.

If this interests you (and if you have a positive attitude and prefer actually working on something to endlessly talking about it), please contact me at alecmuller at gmail.com.  For a description of the project in more detail, keep reading.

[alecmuller]

The basic idea of the site is to guide people through the process of learning a new skill, and to do it as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Users log on, pick a topic like "Programming in Java", and follow a series of tutorials through to the end.  Broad skill sets are broken down into individual concepts, and there's a quiz after each lesson on the concept that it covers.

The unique thing this website offers is that it accommodates several different lessons for each skill and automatically ranks them based on how long it takes people to do them and how well they do on the quizzes afterwards.  Given 3 or 5 different lessons for a single concept, the website ranks all of them and offers the best lesson first.  If you don't "get it" after seeing lesson A and fail the quiz, then you'll go to lesson B and then C and so on until you do get it.

For now all the lessons are free, but later users will have to pay for the best lessons, and authors of those lessons will get royalties.  In the short run I'm paying people by the hour to create (or link to) content to get a critical mass and demonstrate that the site works.  I'm only comfortable doing this with people I know extremely well, however, which is part of why I want to recruit people to live in my house with me and work on it.  I also want to surround myself with people who will help me stay excited about the project.

[Ron Helwig]

What system are you using?

My last "real" job was developing an online curriculum management system. I spent 5 years there. I also have a couple years previous to that working at computer based education companies.

[alecmuller]

Hi Ron,

That's very interesting - I had no idea you'd worked on that kind of stuff.  Are you going to be at Taproom Tuesday tomorrow?  I'd like to ask a bunch of questions about your experiences.

The system we're using is Cake PHP.  I developed the algorithms while Karl Beisel did all the implementation.  Karl is phasing out of the project, though, so I'm taking a few weeks off from work to learn PHP and Cake right now.

Alec

[Ron Helwig]

That's very interesting - I had no idea you'd worked on that kind of stuff.  Are you going to be at Taproom Tuesday tomorrow?  I'd like to ask a bunch of questions about your experiences.

Well, I'm a little sick today, so I'm probably not going to be there.

In '95 I did a contract stint at Plato Learning, where I worked on converting the admin part of the DOS based Plato system to Windows. That became their flagship product "Plato Pathways". Then in 2001 they hired me full time to work on converting the web based follow up to Pathways from a Paradox database to MS SQL Server. The Plato Web Learning Network administers, manages, and runs courseware; from old mainframe based courses running in emulators over the web to Authorware and Flash based lessons and tests.

I know they added AICC and SCORM capabilities, but I mostly just saw the database changes side of that, which wasn't much.

We also added NCLB (No Children Learning Better, AKA National Control of Local Boards) functionality, which from my perspective mostly seemed to be added demographics tracking.

http://ronhelwig.com/resume

The system we're using is Cake PHP.  I developed the algorithms while Karl Beisel did all the implementation.  Karl is phasing out of the project, though, so I'm taking a few weeks off from work to learn PHP and Cake right now.

I figured you'd be going with an open source LMS like Moodle. I've never heard of Cake PHP, but then I'm still fairly new to PHP myself.

[Jacobus]

This is a great idea.

My wife and I are going to put our condo up on the market this spring and then move to New Hampshire when it sells.  We might need provisional housing, so if we get to that point I might discuss this with her.

My most notable skill that I'd be able to offer content for is MATLAB programming.