Download Prodeus

👋 Hi Hackers!
I’m excited to announce the launch of Prodeus, a free chrome extension that cleverly tracks the time you spend watching educational videos on Youtube so that you can earn a digital degree no matter your financial situation.

I built Prodeus because I believe that everyone regardless of wealth, status or nationality deserves equal access to higher education, as it’s the single most important factor in upward social mobility. In these past few years we’ve seen a dramatic rise in remote learning as universities continually raise their prices or close their doors from COVID.

📃 How it works

1. Add the extension to your Chrome browser
2. Connect classes from Youtube📺 to the Prodeus library, including the category and difficulty of the class.
3. Prodeus tracks your time spent watching classes and accrues your hours categorically, allowing you to earn degrees in Art & Design, Computer Science, or Business.
4. As you accrue more hours, you build up your expertise and level up your ProDegree.

🎓 What’s a ProDegree?
ProDegrees mirror traditional university degrees. For instance a Bachelors degree requires 3600 class hours, whereas the reflective ProDegree ‘Master’ requires 2000 class hours. In this first release of our platform we focus on time watched as an indicator of effort.

We plan on adding more functionality to future releases that will bring more ways to showcase and validate learning, to offer deeper insights into a learner’s educational journey.

📚 Learner-Led Education
Studies show that learner-led education yields the best outcomes for students. Prodeus helps you measure your self-education process in a Montessori-style approach, letting you decide what and when to learn.

You can choose each individual class you take or you can follow curated pathways from user-generated Courses, collections of classes that can take users on a complete journey through a particular topic, skill or an entire field. As users try and accrue large quantities of time they will be confronted with diverse and unique viewpoints and learn various ways to attack any one skill or task.

🚨 Quality Control
All of the classes on Prodeus require peer reviews which ends up determining the eligibility of that class to provide credit to students. If classes earn below a 3.5 star rating they will not be eligible to provide credit.

On Our Roadmap
🕹️ Integration with Other Platforms: Soon we will allow our users to track their time on Skillshare, Coursera, Udemy, Lynda.
📦 Project-Based Classes: Course creators will be able to add a project to their youtube class so that students can immediately apply the knowledge they’ve gained in a practical way.
💼 Student Portfolios: As users complete class projects they will be able to build up and showcase a comprehensive body of work.
🗃️ Class Topics: Linking topics and associated skills to classes will provide a new analytical metric to measure your progress and expertise. It also allows us to gamify in new ways like creating skill trees.
Thank you all for the support, and please do share your feedback in the comments.