Coursify: A Free Open-Source Online Course Platform | Hacker News Reader

Coursify: A Free Open-Source Online Course Platform

trycoursify.com

150 pointsFelix2158 comments

WOW! I made it to the front page. Okay so I posted it yesterday and went to bed. Thank you all for your support an feedback.

When Udemy decided to start charging 50% of every sale, I needed another way to sell my Online Courses.

I looked at a few self-hosted Online Course platforms, but they all wanted a monthly fee + transaction fees, which I think is excessive.

So I started working on Coursify. With Coursify, you can download it, install it and use it without paying.

If you don't know rails, you can pay me a one-time installation fee and you can use it forever without any more charges from us...

I also released it under the MIT licence, so others can improve on it.

Thank you.

Is this your project as well? https://medium.com/@sergiojota/codeweekend-review-nigerian-s...

I wrote the article on Medium. I was in contact with 2-3 ex-students of that course. None of them received refunds several months after my article (I imagine I received the refund because I started the "movement").

Yeah 2 years ago. I decided to stop commenting on that but yeah that's just one side of that story

It seems the fedora team really wants to do what they can to discredit my project. Ah well

Or highlight your tendency to copy others' work

Felix,

I'm the founder of http://usefedora.com -- a product you are intimately familiar with.

Love the effort and open source contribution -- but definitely put off by stealing our UI/UX almost verbatim (example site built with our tool: http://bitfountain.io/courses/iwatch-course <-- the same people as your case study, your tool: http://www.onedayrails.com/)

While it is incredibly flattering for a small startup like ours to have an open-source derivative, stealing our interface and design patterns for a project that you charge hundreds of dollars in installation fees definitely leaves a bad taste.

Do it right and we'd have probably helped you promote it. But this just doesn't seem cool.

I didn't realize you owned the exclusive use of the large leaderboard images and rounded buttons design patterns. I'm sure there are loads of people out there profiting off of your patented design that you should probably be harassing as well.

Good thing http://getbootstrap.com/ looks nothing at all like "your" design.

The obvious similarities are throughout the design, including the entirety of the course sales pages, the lecture view, specific iconography, etc.

Both sites just look like a customized bootstrap theme to me

What exactly is he stealing? Big picture at the top followed by some text/testimonials? That's like every second modern landing page these days.

Looks like it goes deeper than that considering his onedayrails.com landing page is the same design, sequence and structure as the default Fedora landing page as well as the internal lessons experience and design

Hi Ankur,

I very much didn't intend to offend you, copy you or cause you to be upset.

That homepage design is based on what Udemy looked like before their update and that's why I felt okay to use it as a starting point.

That said, I'll update the homepage for the course today with a new design as a gesture of good faith.

I think the platform itself, not the homepage/sales page is what the people using coursify like. I suspect many of them won't even use that homepage. It's just a starting point.

Again I'm trying to make friends not enemies. Hope I didn't offend you.

Felix

Happy Easter.

Thank you, appreciate the response and the new design.

Keep me updated with future developments (ankur@usefedora.com) and maybe we can work together in the future.

Hopefully we can.

I'll let you know when the new design is up. I've already coded most of it.

I second Ankur's thoughts here. We've put a lot of time and energy into making our user experience simple and beautiful and while we take it as a compliment that you liked it enough to use our design, we would appreciate it if you came up with your own original design as to differentiate from us.

We're not just a random online education platform that popped up out of the blue - we're real people working very hard to build a quality product.

Congrats on your launch! Just wondering, how did you come up with this pricing model? I think you need to change it because majority of the buyers can wait for 1 day than paying $400. OR am I missing something here?

I created that price plan because I want most people to avoid rushing me to install it for them.

I'm very busy so the peace of mind that most people won't choose that plan is why it's so expensive.

Thank you.

Question: from the video I get the impression that this platform can handle only ONE course, is this right? Still a very nice implementation, good interface work!

Thanks for your feedback.

Yes that's right. Is multi-tenancy something you'll like? If it is, I can start working on this next week.

Of course multitenancy [1] is a nice feature to have for every web based software, however I just wanted to clarify if it was possible to use your product if one has more than one course to offer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitenancy

It's designed for just one course at the moment. I'll add support for more multiple courses later, but at the moment no, you can't sorry.

Really neat! online courses are on the rise and having such a platform just makes it easy to start one.

Just found a typo -

"That means you'll get the best developers from all over the world, working hard to make Courify an excellent platform for you to sell your online course."

I see "Courify".

I'll fix it now thanks. That's what happens when you launch at 8am without sleeping HAHA.

Edit: Fixed

The github link on the downloads page seems to be broken: https://github.com/felixog/coursify

I launched at 8AM (without sleeping all night) and I forgot to make the Git-Repo public (oops).

Its public now and the link now works thank you.

BTW, the actual download link on my website takes you to Dropbox and that link works.

Is your target market individual education entrepreneurs and small teams, or do you have plans to offer this product to universities? The reason I'm asking is because many colleges would spend money on a lightweight course builder that hooked back into their existing learning management system, especially if it gives them flexibility to develop their own courseware, or hosts it for them.

great job! it looks like a good replacement for people trying to juggle with the complexity of a software like moodle. I'm also interesting in knowing if it will support some type of assessment, because it looks like so far it's only a paywall for content. Do you have plans to add support for any type of assessment?

I'm already working on quizzes. I still need to refactor the current code base though so that feature is at least two weeks out.

The multi course feature is already working as well and once I clean the code up, I'll update the code base on GitHub.

Do you have any other type of assessment in mind?

I was excited until I realized the Courses weren't open source. Ah well. xD

It looks nice for its purpose. Congrats on launching. :)

Do you mean the OneDayRails course?

I meant I thought it was a project to encourage people to build & deploy open source courses on a platform. :)

Oh that's a good idea.

Seed planted

Hmm.. seems like server is unable to response to overwhelming & sudden interest

Seems to be back up?

Yup!

Looks great, could you have a list of features you offer? :)

Any plans to have a hosted version?

Yes I'm working on that. And it will also be free . Not sure how I'll monetise that though.

Probably a one time fee to host it on a platform like Amazon whose fees will be separately paid by the user

only with video learning support?

No, you can add text as well. In fact for now, video is an after thought.

Thanks for cloning my company's product, we're flattered.

http://usefedora.com

(We're the ones who power courses like http://bitfountain.io)

Except yours isn't free.

Your "free" tier costs $1 + 10% per transaction, which is ridiculously expensive. Even Paypal doesn't rip me off that bad.

We actually drop the transaction fee once you're actually making money. Check it out: usefedora.com/pricing.

To your point, if there's a free tier with a transaction fee, doesn't that mean it's totally free to use? We handle all the hosting for you, so it's a little misleading to call this system free.

With Fedora, we make money when you do - which is an amazing alignment of incentives if you ask me. This really helps people who are just starting out and want to use a robust product. Right now folks using Fedora teach near 400,000 students in any language you can imagine.

Disclaimer, I Co-Founded Fedora and you have any questions, feel free to reach out conrad@usefedora.com.

Sure, but even if you find our pricing completely outrageous, that doesn't make it OK right?

Sure there are differences. It's still a blatant clone. OP could have at least created his own UI.

From the person who "cloned" your product.

> I looked at a few self-hosted Online Course platforms, but they all wanted a monthly fee + transaction fees, which I think is excessive.

To be fair if it comes to pinching things your name seems familiar. I'm guessing you went with usefedora.com as getfedora.com was taken? :)

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