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Sorusch
Sorusch

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Why the future of online education is live and social

You were sick of looking for a technical co-founder for that startup idea. Or maybe you have been stuck in a job and an industry that you hate and you decided to learn how to code to work for a tech startup.

We may have had different motivations for why we wanted to learn how to code, but most of us have ended up in this familiar situation, shortly thereafter:

While the first couple of hours or even days of learning how to program were extremely exciting, we hit that wall where we can't simply copy and paste something that we read online and fix what's not working. We give up on the self-paced online course and start watching a bunch of YouTube tutorials -- to no avail.

Most of us have already given up at this point. Some of us are lucky enough to have a friend or family member who can help us get "unstuck". Usually, even that person can't dedicate themselves to helping you get "unstuck" over and over again.

Today, online education falls broadly into one of the following two categories:

1) Self-paced pre-recorded courses (i.e. MOOCs) such as Coursera, Udemy, etc.: these are basically glorified, multi-media versions of textbooks where engagement is low and it's easy to get stuck and lose motivation.

2) Cohort-based live courses: these online courses are live and engaging with very low student-to-teacher ratios. However, they are priced accordingly and make the highly engaging learning format unattainable for most people.

I believe there can and should be a third solution: scalable, social live education. In short? "Twitch for Education".

In college, I learned as much, if not more, from the students I was sitting next to as from the professor who was lecturing in front of me. What brought me back to each lecture was that social experience. And that's exactly what's missing online today.

That's why I decided to hack together a product that addresses this very problem:

Keat is a social learning platform where you can learn from the best and with the best. You can find study-buddies in the interactive live chat and ask your instructor questions during dedicated Q&A sessions.

One of these teachers is Sailesh Kumar, a Senior Software Engineer at Facebook, who previously was an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at GSU. Let's say, he talks the talk and walks the walk. And 200 of his students have already received job offers as software engineers.

Sailesh will be going live tonight at 8 pm EST (5 pm PST) on Keat, teaching the Fundamentals of Programming.

If you're interested to learn more about the curriculum and sign up, you can click on this link: https://keat.co/upcomingclass/fundamentals-of-programming-1612212653701x556236334813151200

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