Launch HN: Miyagi (YC W25) turns YouTube videos into online, interactive courses
Hey HN, we’re Tyrone and Guang, founders of Miyagi Labs (https://miyagilabs.ai), an AI-powered education platform that transforms educational YouTube videos into interactive courses. It helps you learn better through active practice and personalized feedback.
We use LLMs to automatically generate quizzes, practice questions, and real-time feedback from any educational video or resource—turning passive watching into active learning. Here’s a short demo: https://youtu.be/alO7FaorHOY.
Improving education has always been tricky. Bloom’s 2-sigma problem (showing that a high-quality personal tutor is far more effective than conventional methods) has persisted, even as technology has advanced.
We met at MIT as CS majors and have always been passionate about education. Over the years, we’ve become teachers and experts in subjects like chess, algorithms, math, languages, and ninja warrior. A common theme was that we both heavily relied on YouTube to learn.
YouTube has incredible content for learning pretty much anything, but it’s buried in a lot of distractions. Also, passively watching videos is far less effective than taking notes, asking questions, and doing practice problems, which is what we aim to do with Miyagi Labs.
Our solution is essentially a multi-step function that takes in a YouTube playlist (or list of any resources) and outputs an entire course with summaries, questions, answers, and more. The pipeline is roughly: video/resource —> transcript/text —> chunks —> summary and question —> answers to questions, with some other features along the way.
We mostly use prompting and different models at each step to make the course as useful as possible. Certain topics require more practice problems vs. comprehension, and we’d use reasoning models for highly technical subjects.
We launched about three months ago and currently have 400+ courses and partnerships with some businesses and awesome creators. Some of our popular courses include 3Blue1Brown’s linear algebra course, a botany course on plants and ecology, and YC’s How to Start a Startup series.
Our product resembles classical MOOC-style course platforms in terms of UI, but is more interactive. It’s really easy to ask a question or receive custom feedback compared to a static course on Coursera. It’s also comparable to AI tutor sites, but we try to build more of a community and require less activation energy as a learner. We’re basically betting that AI can hugely improve education, but that students still want to learn from their favorite creators and want baseline shared resources for standard topics that are then augmented with personalized features.
You can try it here: https://miyagilabs.ai (no login required for most courses—but if you sign up you can also create your own course).
We’d love your feedback on what kinds of videos/resources you’d like to learn from, what’s missing from current learning tools, and if you know any creators or educators who would like to collaborate. Happy to hear any feedback and answer any questions!
You're compensating the youtube video creators for this, how? Are you asking their permission? Or is this similar to how all the AI scammers operate and just extracting value from other peoples work without compensation? Just curious if this will help the people who are actually doing the source work or if it's just another way to take other people's labor and make money off it without anything in return for them.
And no, I don't consider "they get extra views" a valid answer. Especially if you expect to make the windfall you want to make off their labor.
We do a revenue share with the creators for any content we monetize. And if they don't want their content on our platform, we will take it down.
Not a bad concept. I already do something similar
I already use LLMs to quiz me on books that I'm reading. The current book I've been studying is "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (8th edition)." Obviously since it is a text book, there are homework problems and other discussion points. However; it's also fun to ask grok/chatGPT to quiz me on previous chapters and correct my answers.
There's plenty of conference talks posted on YouTube that I've watched over the years. Next talk I watch I will probably test out being quizzed by LLMs.
You can feed a YouTube link into some LLMs and get it to quiz you as well. I use this technique as well!
I was at Coursera for years and pitched this exact thing multiple times internally! So excited to finally see it being built. Congratulations on the launch!
This concept is really cool and solves big challenges around content creation. Obviously, it adds new challenges around pedagogy, licensing, and ads. The last part is a big no no for blue chip edtech platforms.
Thanks! We'd love to chat if you have any ideas or want to share your experience, we think Coursera is great. And yea totally understand the blue chip edtech thing, we're pretty excited to be a startup in this space.
Happy to help and chat if it helps --> my username at donobu dot com
Congrats on the launch! I personally am not sure I see the value in paying for a course, when (I assume) I can do this on my own by feeding a video link or file to an LLM and asking it to generate a course. I'm sure your courses are probably better, though, and there are probably a lot of people who don't want to go through those extra steps. Good luck!
The flashcards app is not great. It can improve.
More serious comment.
It seems like there is less space (in our mind, and time) for yet another app. If you have this, vs youtube for course, people will still flock to youtube. Why don't you add the value that you are giving here by directly integrating or enhancing youtube. A chrome plugin or a youtube browser?
I really like the motivation behind this product. Learning is hard.
Really cool idea! Some improvements I'd recommend with the ultimate goal being "getting users to learn the subject at hand".
1) Section Lectures on the left side need to be cleaned up, instead of just a numbered list. Seeing 30+ lectures off rip is a bit daunting, especially with no labeling, sectioning, etc. I'd imagine feeding a model a list of all the lecture titles, then having it structured should work?
2) You're doing too much on the bottom section.
You need to incorporate all those tabs into the single Ai tutor, which can run whatever tools required (maybe notes/discussion can be a small additional indication). No one's going to be using the Flashcards section, and it's calling probably the same LLM as the AI tutor, so might as well combine them.
For the quiz, maybe when the video ends or the user wants to continue, the Ai Tutor goes into "quiz mode" forcing the user to attempt or pass the quiz (depending on the settings?).
Think of this like Cursor but for Education. Cursors powerful agent can handle/do so much, you're not using 3-4 different fields.
Oh and have it on the right side instead of transcript, so it's right there in users faces instead of having to scroll down.
Great points. Definitely will improve the section lectures on the left, some formatting stuff to think about with the bottom section/transcript as well.
Not completely sure about the AI tutor points though. I don't think the standard AI chat interface is the ideal form factor for the average person trying to learn something, and there's value in having pre-generated content that users can see instead of having to actively go to the tutor.
Also, a lot of people do like using flashcards specifically to learn! Granted, our current implementation is pretty barebones so it's not super useful yet. And definitely agree that things can be cleaned up quite a bit.
congrats on the launch!
i opened a random lecture (MIT 14.01 Lecture 19: International Trade: Welfare and Policy)
a- i tried an exercise without watching the video, and then clicked on 'watch' next to the question, i expected it would take me to relevant portion of the video instead it played it from beginning.
b- i used the ai tutor and asked 2 random questions, instead of giving me an answer it prodded to provide more detail. this might be an intentional choice to ensure learning, however i personally prefer chatgpt's style where it gives me some information and then provides more angles to pursue.
i also asked the tutor about batman, here's the response for reference:
tell me about batman That's a good start, but your question is very broad. When you say "tell me about Batman," are you looking for information about the character's origin, his role in comics, his significance in popular culture, or something else? Try to narrow down your question a bit.
For example, are you interested in: - Batman's backstory and how he became a superhero? - The different versions of Batman in comics, movies, and TV?
Thanks! Yea the watch button should do that, we added 14.01 before that feature but will fix asap.
And yea probably thinking to do a guiding mode (as you said, often better to have the tutor guide you through step-by-step instead of giving you the answer right away) and a straightforward answer mode for the tutor. Or if you have any other ideas.
Your app is simply awesome. I've playing with it for a bit and I can see how this approach would make traditional homework much more engaging. Also, the LLM doesn't care about the language used in the responses, so my understanding is that localizing the content in different languages would be very straightforward.
This is, I think, particularly important for kids in most parts of the world as a majority of the internet pedagogical content is English-based. Or for people like me, that struggle with that language when talking about topics outside the tech industry.
Congrats for your project, I'm sure we share the same positive view about the future of learning :)
This is a fun concept, and I love the name!
I’m curious why you didn’t use multiple choice for the exercises? I feel like those would be easier than typing out full answers and be closer to MOOC style homework. Maybe have a longer written question at the end of a section.
The exercises work pretty well, I like the highlighting red wrong vs. green right. It does feel a bit like the MOOC-style discussions. The tutor doesn’t just tell you the answers which is cool, but something about talking with the tutor feels a bit flat. And the flashcards weren’t very helpful for the course I picked.
I could see myself doing some courses like this with some more gamification. Being able to filter by course provider (Ycombinator, or MIT) would be cool too.
Thanks! We do have multiple choice questions now (agreed) but some of the older courses were generated when there were only short answer.
Anything specific we could improve about talking to the tutor? Definitely will add some of those features and gamify better.
Maybe give the tutor some personality or persona (having it speak as the instructor). I’m probably off base with that suggestion, though.
Again, very cool idea. I'm going to try some of the nuclear courses later this week.
Best of luck!
Please don't, or at least don't without a looooooooooot of behind-closed-doors trial and error. There are few things more off-putting then an AI try-hard "i am a quirky hooman with quirky hooman personality traits".
I am very interested in this, and I have personally built manual workflows to do Youtube video -> rip audio->transcript->llm context.
For example, taking a video about building garden retaining walls and generating detailed system prompts for Q&A with the expert in the video.
I reference ~home improvement or tool videos and often comments contain points of wisdom or even corrections of mistakes (errata) on videos that are otherwise good. For example, setting up a hand plane and ways to mark a board you're working on.
Do you use video comments in your context? I've (manually) scraped content on educational videos and built prompting to assess signal and incorporate what are likely important errata in LLM context.
> video/resource —> transcript/text —>
For this step in your pipeline, are you multi-modal? I mean, are you using the LLM to interpret what is shown in the video itself? How is that content used?
Do you have any sense for allowing people to generate educational content off arbitrary videos?
For now we only use the YouTube transcript because for most educational content we've found it does about as well for lower cost.
We may make that an option though, since we also offer other resource types (pdf, slides, docs) -> course.
To your last question, what do you mean by arbitrary? If the video is not educational at all, then the generated course will likely not be good. If the video is pure entertainment then probably not a good use case.
For anyone else interested in Bloom's 2-sigma, here's the original paper (1984): https://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf
Blows my mind that 1:1 tutoring dwarfs the impact of other factors such as socioeconomic status, reinforcement, assigned homework, classroom morale, etc (at least according to the researchers).
Does anyone know if this thesis has been replicated? Or if these results hold in modern times (original study was 40 years ago)?
The article states that Anaina and Burke separately conducted their tests, but social robots [1] have been shown to be effective in individual tutoring. Human tutoring is not always better than a well-designed computer program [2]. There have been issues with how studies interpret their effect on group size / scalability [3].
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/scirobotics.aat5954 [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00461520.2011.61... [3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X2091279...
In my experience with 1:1 before and during my Masters in Education, nothing could compare to the learning and growth my students had from that highly personalized (and personal) instruction.
It's super common for students to not understand material or express that they don't, but it's just not possible to drill into each specific student's particular knowledge or skill level in the classroom environment.
On the social and behavioral side, many students who struggle in a classroom environment transform into model students when taught with both the care and privacy of 1:1.
For me, I feel it's a combination of hyper-personalized instruction plus compassion in a relationship where it feels safer for the student to accept the value of improving at something without social pressure or embarrassment.
Would be nice ie to see this product with focus on elementary school age content.
Can you extend this into language learning content on YT? I think that would also have amazing utility. As a biologist, so happy to see Crime Pays but Botany doesn't on here. Thanks for the awesome tool. I will be using it.
Yes! I did something similar with daily exercises at https://app.fluentsubs.com/exercises/daily
This is really cool!
Prof. Steve Brunton's YT channel is a treasure trove of material for you folks, with course-like playlists for controls, data-driven engineering, and dynamical systems: https://www.youtube.com/@Eigensteve/playlists
He should be a featured creator, much like 3b1b is for math!
We'll reach out and hopefully add some courses! Thanks.
Congratulations on the launch guys! Was interested in such a product for a long time. I think adding social collaboration would be a game changer for a tool like this. Imagine people being able to start their own cohorts to learn and keeping each other accountable. Looking forward!!
This is so useful as so many of the best things to learn in the world aren't locked up in universities!
Just wanna say that this is one of those magical ideas that I'd never personally think of, but when I see it like this, it makes perfect sense! So cool.
Seems to actually work! Thanks for sharing, I'll be checking it out.
I think this is a great idea. I’ve learned so much on YouTube but it’s always been in small chunks and very task oriented. I imagine there’s a lot of content Which covers broad topics that I don’t come across.
Something I’ve been doing more and more lately is asking chatgpt to create a detailed description of a topic which can be read aloud for whatever duration I plan on driving. This works exceptionally well - even for short 5 minute drives.
I wonder if the same can be done for video-based content. Sometimes I’m short on time but still want to learn something.
Poker, specifically Texas No Limit Hold'em, is widely taught on Youtube.
Here are some of the very best in the category, it would be really cool if you partnered with any of these.
https://www.youtube.com/@hungryhorsepoker
https://www.youtube.com/@CarrotCornerPoker
https://www.youtube.com/@PokerCoaching
Poker is interesting. I think these videos do work in our current course generation process. However, I do think some subjects like poker need custom tooling around the course to really make the learning experience great. For example, access to solvers or actually playing a hand on a table is a part of the course experience as well. Chess is another one that falls in this special bucket imo. Some of this tooling is on the roadmap!
Thanks, we'll reach out. We have a poker course from MIT (https://miyagilabs.ai/course/mit15s50) but yea these seem more practical & engaging.
Instead of direct trivia from the content, it would be helpful to have an exercise (with evaluation) that applies the content learnt - a small artifact production with real-world practical use.
Imagine you would need, another ai pipeline that poses as the consumer and applier of the knowledge, instead of a direct processor ai of content information as it currently seems.
Nice work! How do you verify correctness of the generated exercises and explanations? To me this looks the biggest risk in becoming a user: what if my _teacher_ teaches me subtle nonsense that I cannot easily detect since I'm learning and unfamiliar with the material (even if it's only in the 1-2% of cases)? Human teachers make mistakes too, but an LLM cannot _understand_ that it made one... So.. how do you solve for this issue of trust?
they dont verify, they just present a LLM app and the user suffers if the information is not correct. however most of the time it is correct but sometimes it is not. one way to verify correctness is to ask a bigger model like OpenAI o3
I’m not sure how the solution to “LLMs lie” is “more LLM”. I’ve personally had o3 tell me stuff like: “I ran this query against version 0.10 of DuckDB and verified that it works” when the query contains functions that don’t exist in DuckDB or “this version gets better PageSpeed Insights results” when I know it can’t check those. It happens surprisingly often and it’s super obvious. However, it’s made me seriously wary of the information that it gives which I can’t verify purely based on logic.
I work in edtech and one of my teams is content creation, so pretty excited about this space but also very aware of the challenges and massive amounts of hype and over promise / under deliver. To assess I tried to generate a short (< 10m), one-video course from a YT video I've previously watched on a topic I'm an "expert" - after an hour all I see is the embedded video, the transcript and "generating content" dialog.
UPDATE: " This course failed to generate. Please try again or contact us."
I really like a lot of the components of your idea, but the execution is underwhelming. Right now it feels like you're providing middling tools for too many components without nailing any of them. Alternatively I could watch the YT video at all ready has a transcript, take notes in any tool, and ask questions to any LLM; the piece missing is context, so that's where it feels like you should focus.
Re: assessments; it feels like you're being distracted here; I'm not convinced that's how your natural target market learns in this modality. We generate quizes in our product, but it's typically used in the "internal compliance" segment - think mandatory training like food safety for food preparers - not the external (typically adult) self-improvement market (which is huge!). If you're going to do asessments you need a lot of non-AI boilerplate around tracking, validation and certification/credentials. My two cents: quizes in your app are a cool demo feature with little real value.
I’ve got 20 years of experience teaching mathematics at a community college. MyMathLab and it’s various clones are all terrible. My brief tinkering with this product has impressed me. Certainly it underdelivers at this point but they are on the right track as far as interface and usability. Don’t know if they can pull this off but being different than existing ed tech players in mathematics is a good thing since Pearson, etc. all suck.
Sorry we're running into some rate limits with course generation but will be fixed soon. Valid points—will respond in a bit.
Reviewing a service that didn’t work is like reviewing a product that never arrived in the mail.
Not sure you can draw many conclusions on an experience you didn’t have. My own two cents
Does it work on YouTube videos that have transcripts disabled?
No, it won't work for those.
You probably know this, but gemini is great to generate transcripts. I did a quick browser extension for that: https://github.com/za01br/yt-subtitle-extension
Congrats on the launch!
Miyagi is a pretty nice name to give!
Neat idea! Do you do anything with the video itself? Understand the visual content or extract details from slides?
Users can upload slides (ie. docx or pptx) and create a course from them - give it a try! For videos, we don't currently process any frames from the video just the transcript, but this is on the roadmap.
Ah ok. Nice!
Let us know if you’d want to extract from long videos. You might find this useful: https://docs.vlm.run/guides/video-ai/guide-video-transcripti...
Do you have any revenue sharing program with the content creators? Or are you just poaching them?
Lol yea not just poaching, we do revenue sharing (signed deals with a bunch of top creators). They get the majority of all revenue from courses.
For instance we worked directly with Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't & Faculty of Khan etc. to get official courses that they also had input in, and 3Blue1Brown is on board with us having his content on our site.
They probably haven't decided yet
That would mean poaching lol
I hope you view a YouTube ad on that video every time the course is opened otherwise it’s a self defeating system.
Are the people that create the content okay with this?
Yes. Any content that we monetize we are revenue sharing with the creator. We already have more than 5 partnerships with creators.
Do creators have the option to opt out?
I’m still coming up to speed on the full scope of what your product does, but I’m curious what you’d say to someone like pal2tec, who has some fairly strong and what I feel to be reasonable views about the impact of content summarization [0].
Getting direct buy-in and sharing revenue is great. But it’s not clear to me that this is the only thing that creators care about, i.e. are you still summarizing content you’re not monetizing without creator buy-in?
- [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ULUSS1-G3do
Yep, if anyone didn't want their videos to be on our site, we would take it down.
Just watched the video, I don't initially agree with his take completely but do totally respect the viewpoint and think a payment split to the creator whenever someone summarizes the video makes sense.
Yes we do offer the option to summarize content without creator buy-in, although it seems a bit different since we're also augmenting the content with questions etc. which should drive users to watch the video even more as opposed to skip it and just read the summary.
But you're right it's not perfect. If we ever have creators who don't want their stuff on our site we'd totally respect their wishes, but that hasn't been the case right now so this seems like the best thing to do.
I do think the fact that your product is likely to drive views makes this less of a concern than what YT is doing.
From a creator’s point of view, I think the concern would be about how true this remains as the product grows/evolves.
But as long as there’s an opt-out, that seems like a reasonable approach.
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I don't think that's true? We're embedding the videos, which is allowed.
Also to be clear we have partnerships for all the featured courses. This refers to if a user creates a course based on some videos.
> I don't think that's true? We're embedding the videos, which is allowed.
Are you not still making derivative content of the work without the copyright holder's permission? A judge might not care that much whether the video is embedded or not.
> Yep, if anyone didn't want their videos to be on our site, we would take it down.
Do note that this behavior of "opting creators into a program without their consent, justifying it via revenue share, and CYA with a 'they can opt out if they want to!' shield" is still... awful optics.
The whole Brave scandal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736888) is a good case study on how laypeople will perceive this. It's not popular at all.
Not to be ironic, but... is there a summary of that video? It's a bit long and he doesn't seem to get to the point for quite a while.
It’s an 8 minute video…and even shorter at 1.5X that will take me longer to summarize than you to watch.
But in summary, YouTube is rolling out AI summarization features on some content without giving creators any say in the matter.
Concerns include:
- Low quality summarization of high quality content will devalue the content, and in many cases is just a worse version of the content
- Impact to watch time on the channel can impact channel success over time
- YouTube is not doing anything to compensate creators for reducing watch time such as sharing revenue from viewers who primarily interact with the AI summary
But I think he articulates this much better than I did. Much better to watch the video.
Thanks, I appreciate that!
FWIW, unfortunately, I think the problem is a two-headed one, and maybe reversed for viewers vs creators. Creators want as many people to see their work as possible. But viewers have to sift through a graveyard of 95%+ junk videos to find the 5% worth watching. AI (or Google/TikTok/etc. in general) acting as gatekeeper in between isn't great, but not having any metrics/summaries/descriptions for videos would be even worse.
In this particular case, I get that this particular creator might've had a point to make, but the description and summary were so cheekily written (to make a point, I guess) that I had no idea what it was about.
The creators who I do follow typically make long-form educational videos with a lot of nuance; I wouldn't want to rely on even the best-written human summary for those. But there are many, many videos for which I'd prefer a 1-sentence summary over 3 minutes of intros and jokes, a 45-second sponsorship, and a gradual dramatic buildup before getting to the point.
Not sure what the long-term solution is.
The videos are the intellectual property of the creator, and YouTube has the rights to distribute and make money off of it for hosting it for you to billions of users. What's the problem? The creator can take their content somewhere else or host it themselves on their website
If the building I live in implements policies that are hostile to their tenants, that's their right and I can choose to move, but it's still hostile.
For sake of argument, let's say that this feature causes a 20% reduction in video views.
This feature is part of YouTube Premium, meaning that YouTube is making money on it, but in its current form the creator is not. So in essence, YouTube has chosen to take the creator's content, create derivative content based on it, and make money off of that derivative content while removing some portion of the creator's revenue. In most contexts, this would be described as theft, and I think that's a fair word to use here even if I'm sure the T&C covers it somewhere.
> What's the problem? The creator can take their content somewhere else or host it themselves on their website
You don't see a problem with a move like this? Obviously creators can move elsewhere, but it's a hostile move on YouTube's part nonetheless.
3b1b is a monetized partner?
Association with that brand would be very valuable.
Not yet! We don't monetize his content (it's not behind a paywall). But we are talking with him :)
Who cares?
The people who spend hundreds of hours carefully creating content for their viewers care [0].
The referenced video is from a photographer who has some pretty strong and reasonable thoughts on this - specifically the features YouTube itself is experimenting with.
Depending on the nature of the AI product, it has the potential to completely sideline creators.
Not saying that’s what Miyagi is doing and it sounds like they’re actually working with creators on this which is good. But the broader point is that such tools need to be thoughtfully implemented.
- [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ULUSS1-G3do
They put their videos out for public consumption. Not behind a paywall. Once its out there, they lose control of how people interact with it. Should cliff notes and other study guides be banned or regulated?
I don’t find Cliff’s notes to be similar at all. They represent standalone short-form content written by authors that is a purchasable option alongside more in-depth options written by other (or at times the same) authors.
If Cliff’s notes were actually just AI summaries of specific books generated by an unrelated entity and presented in a way that allowed the reader to avoid purchasing the underlying content, that’d be a very different scenario.
In the linked example, YouTube is essentially doing the latter. The product launched in this thread sits in a greyer area I think, but still raises some questions about content ownership and how creators will react to these new kinds of tools and modes of consumption.
Whether or not it’s strictly legal is a different conversation than whether or not creators feel comfortable with these emerging options.
> Once its out there, they lose control of how people interact with it.
Sure. But they also have every right to choose to put it behind a paywall if new tools change the calculus that originally made publishing it publicly make sense.
Marketers, among others
Shout out to Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't :)
Yea he's awesome! We just launched another official course with him yesterday haha (https://miyagilabs.ai/course/taxonomy-and-plant-id)
Amazing approach! Is learning a second language too different from the types of courses Miyagi was designed for, or do you see a potential for that category?
Thanks! Definitely some potential, we actually built a language learning tool for a few days early on (but decided that it was too crowded of a space to start in).
Learning languages seems a bit different in that there's more focus on repetition compared to comprehension questions, but there are certain topics (like grammar concepts) that could work well in our current structure. Also there are some really popular YouTube channels for learning any language, so we definitely see a potential to augment those videos to more accurately & effectively learn.
I was actually thinking about building this because I watch a lot of YT videos in other languages (best way to do travel research is to search the destination using the local name and getting local videos).
How censored is the "AI Tutor"? can a parent leave their child with it unsupervised?
It's currently run on gpt-4o with some prompting guardrails, but I wouldn't trust it completely for younger (elementary school age) children.
Most of our courses are built for a slightly older age range, but we'd consider rolling out more beginner courses that are geared towards younger children and have more safety tests. If you have any thoughts let us know!
How do you validate you’re not generating garbage, and thus teaching people nonsense?
For official courses, we go over the generated course with the creator to vet the content. Generally they're pretty impressed but have a few things they'd like to change/add before publishing.
For self-created courses, it's generally been quite accurate and we're playing around with some eval metrics to make it as good as possible, but it's definitely a concern.
Is the course creator being impressed the most important metric? Are there other more concrete metrics you are able to use to determine quality from the perspective of a student?
I am curious if you are using any methodologies from the digital learning space like knowledge tracing to help ensure that learners are actually retaining knowledge and improving over time or knowledge mapping to understand the gaps that might exist in your content?
Do you maintain your own skills taxonomy? Are you tagging your questions or assessment events with knowledge components or skills of any kind to understand what you are testing your students for?
All of this is really cool, I’m just curious at what level you’ve gotten to on some of this because there is a very fine line in online educational content between making the students life more difficult and actually helping them learn, especially when you get into auto-generating content, and especially if you aren’t following solid principles to verify your content. (I work for an online education company and particularly in the space of training LLMs and verifying their outputs for use in educational contexts)
At this stage it seems like a good metric since it's the creator's content. We're adding a feature for question feedback from users, so they can like/dislike/report questions, but very open to other metrics if you have any ideas.
Yep—also in the process of adding learning paths for certain subjects, so you can go from an introductory course to more advanced topics and fill in gaps in understanding. Agreed: our mission is to help students actually learn in the best way possible, we have individual courses now to start out but the goal is to integrate the learning experience.
Very curious to chat about what you guys do, and if you have recs for any literature in the space that we should look at.
I made a comment a few weeks back that goes over a lot of the research I’ve been reading in the area: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43543335
Also happy to chat more, I find this space really interesting!
So in less promotional words:
- For official courses the creators are doing some quality control and do necessary fixes. - For self-created courses there is zero human supervision or quality control.
Is that correct?
Yes for the first, technically yes for the second? The user can go in and change the content as well (i.e. if it's a teacher generating a course for students). But not sure what other human supervision + quality control methods you're referring to that we could implement.
How worried are you about platform risk?
I don’t think they’re attached to YouTube too rigidly. (Well, I hope at least.) In theory this should work with any platform that provides subtitles. But I think if YouTube falls, or blocks their API access, they would just start hosting the videos themselves.
> In theory this should work with any platform that provides subtitles.
Streaming platforms can vary quite a lot in how they choose to distribute subtitles. I've worked with scraping subtitles from both Youtube and Netflix and I will say that these platforms distribute subtitles very differently!
Yes! It will take some time to write a scraper for another platform (probably not Netflix haha), but after that it’s plug-n-play.
And of course, if they decide to host videos on their own platform, they can just import subtitles from srt/vtt/ass which should be easily possible with some open source library.
Yea YouTube is only one format we support. Users can also upload pdfs, mp4, docx, pptx, etc. And we already do support video hosting ourselves. It wouldn't be great if YouTube decided to part ways with us, but we'd be just fine.
Does the list of resources simply need to be a list of links to video objects?
They can be links or actual files such as mp4 videos.
Great idea! Automated quiz generation seems like a nice use case for LLMs.
it's a natural extension after you use the LLM to generate the content. We do these in our content creation - and I assume learners use an LLM to answer them :)
this is super interesting would love to give it a try!
The tech looks cool.
But it does seem that your platform ingests video content without the permission of the person who creates these videos? The value of your platform is driven by the people creating the videos. You say that you do revenue sharing, and that you have done 5 partnerships. But you have 400 courses, so what about the other 395?
Putting it as kindly as I can: this is ethically fraught. Really, did nobody in the room point this out? You do not come off looking like a partner here.
You need to make this opt-in, not opt-out, and specify revenue sharing terms up front. Those terms need to be generous. The people who produce video content are producing the majority of your product's value. Opt-out, of an ambiguous revenue sharing agreement, is not enough.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43973153
Bro this is dope. I want to use neetcode 150 to practice/study interview problems
No python course?
Nice work! Really cool.
Congrats on launch
Great concept!
Good Stuff!
Nice App. Another similar one is You learn ai.
https://app.youlearn.ai/?via=sou
This is awesome! Congrats Tyrone & Guang!
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