Search Engine for Learning Resources
I'm thinking about creating a search engine for learning resources...
A place where you'll be able to type a subject and get the best rated resources by media type, such as:
- courses
- blogs
- Videos (YT, Vimeo)
- Books
- etc etc
The idea behind it? Too much information... to many resources...
In my experience, I get lost in the sea of information and it takes me time to find the good ones. Usually through recommendations in forum posts.
I want to cut all that out, and be able to shorten the search from few hours to few minutes, and also reduce the probability of us starting to learn from a resource, be it a book or a course, just to discover it's inferior and a total waste of time.
What do you think? would you use it? Have any ideas for improvement?
Edit:
I created a prototype, it should be something like this, with more types of resources.
I came up with a similar idea as a project to learn Next JS and Tailwind over the last few weeks. Still far from finished, and knowing me, that's the way it'll stay now that the fun bits have been built!
Here it is, but it has hardly any resources added yet...
https://www.learnbuild.be
I think we come from a similar way of thinking :)
I created curriculums for certain topics... like this one.
If you are not working on this anymore, what are you working on now?
I think so! I was thinking of a similar feature called "paths" where you could click on a resource and add it to create a custom curriculum. I'm not working on anything else at the moment. I will finish a few bits I had planned on that site before moving on to another idea.
How were you thinking of making money from the idea? Selling course creators a featured spot?
This is an awesome coincidence. I actually had an entire site dedicated to "Learning paths" where people would build curriculums and share them with each other.
I saw that engagement was low.
If learners can't find a good resource they won't return, and If they found a good resource, they would then learn from it for several months and won't return.
So they wouldn't return either way :D
So I built professional community features around those curriculums, and now I'm addressing communities.
The search engine is a free cool tool I thought would help learners.
I think you would have to figure out a way to vet what's a good resource vs not.
A popular course for instance, doesn't mean it's better then a newer one for example.
So I guess thats the question I would ask; How do you know this resource is better than that one?
Maybe coming out with some sort of voting criteria and making sure that criteria is visible and known to all users.
A valid point, I'll need to find a credibility mechanism.
Voting is a very good mechanism, but it will not solve the edge-case you presented with a new good course.
Right now, in their respective platforms, these courses are rated by humans, so the new courses will still have to fight the established ones.
How about a custom search query on Google?
Interesting...Is this possible? Can you create a query that will return top results from:
Do you know how to do it?
Would you mind define too results?
I'm sorry but I didn't really understand the question.
I'm not sure if it already exists, but it's a good idea.
I'm wondering though. How will you decide which courses are really good 🤔
I thought that as a first iteration I'll present just the 20 top-rated on each platform
20 best books on Amazon/Google
20 best Podcasts
20 best courses on udemy/coursera
It'll will first rely on the host local rating, so Amazon rating, coursera rating, udemy rating etc etc...
So at the very least, it'll cut out all the medium+low rated ones.
What do you think?
It's a good idea. Worth trying.
In the long run that would be a free info product right?
Yes It should be free.
I created a prototype:
https://jiruto.com/explore