Show HN: Madrassa – Code and Design Courses Reduced to 5sec GIFs

Just launched www.madrassa.co Where I try to tackle the 90% dropout rate that online courses experience, by reducing the 10,15,30+ hours of course material to 1,2,3 minutes total. Using the native language of the web (GIF) to teach Code & Design skills. What courses would you want to see on madrassa?

A few quick comments:

1. It would be nice to be able to use arrow keys to move through the courses. Even when I have my mouse, I prefer to use my keyboard for this.

2. Related, it would be nice to have the browser's back/forward work as expected.

3. As another commenter noted, it's hard to see where in the gif loop it is, some indicator (or ability to restart it) would be great.

It looks great and I'm looking forward to learning using it.

This is a truly interesting concept. By shortening the learning time like this, things seem a lot more doable, particularly on the first levels. I think one of the things that make it so hard for people not to drop out is the fact that just starting seems like this insurmountable task. I wonder how this would work on more complex levels, though. Great job, in any case!

I'd love to see a flappy bird-like game being developed.

Great idea. One small comment: Some of the text needs some work, e.g. for the free lesson on prototype two of the required materials are listed as "A4 paper" (would a letter-sized paper not do, is the specific size important? Better say "a sheet of paper that's larger than ...") and "some pencils" (some sounds strange here because pencil is a count noun).

Other than those, when I clicked on the next arrow on the first screen I was presented with a screen with problems (Chrome 38.0 on Mavericks): the text "2/20" was sitting on top of the instruction text and the window displayed nothing. Why not detect the user device and put a help message indicating that the site has to be used on a mobile device? When you say "You'll only need an iOS or Android device" in the course description I thought (mistakenly) that these will be required in addition to my laptop.

Interesting. I like the implication that content runtime is a cost not a benefit of courses. And the content is accessible as text and forward-skippable nicely. As someone who avoids youtube unless it's the only source of information on a subject, this is great.

Not entirely sure about calling it "madrassa", though.

Looks like a nice idea. Here's my two cents:

1. It's a bit hard for me to tell when the GIF starts or loops, specially when I try to read the text below it. Perhaps there could be some small delay at the end, or a progress indicator?

2. Could you possibly make the next/previous arrows regular links (with return false or whatever is used to prevent it from reloading the page)? I'm in a setup where using the mouse is awkward, and I can't reach that arrow using only the keyboard.

Absolutely. Some of the sites brag about having 30+hour of content, not knowing that for many that's scaring them away.

Tnx! noting down the flappy bird-like-game course.

Doesn't the name have seriously negative connotations... at least in English-language media. Until I looked it up right now, I didn't know that is a positive word in Arabic. I have always seen in portrayed negatively and associated with Islamic fundamentalism.

Could not access the site in Chrome. Just got the message "Tnx, we will notify you when new courses become available."

No content available. Seems like it's premature to launch an announcement on HN when you're still invitation-only.

I can click on 'Get Early Access', without entering an email address.

I like it! Not so hot on the gifs, but it's short and sweet.

Not sure how common this is, but isn't your logo really similar to http://mymixify.com?

Very innovative and fun at the same time. You should showcase this to schools, as kids would definitely love it.