1. I'm bored and lazy. Tell me what this is, in 10 seconds.
We bring you video lectures and text material and simulate an university like feel. You can view lectures, take notes, take quizzes, collaborate on projects, work with your friends on facebook and more. Basically it is a virtual university that you can attend for free.
2. OMG - are all these stuff free?
Yes. All the videos and educational material at the moment are free.
3. I hate those pestering text boxes. Do I need to login to view videos?
No. You can view videos without being logged in. However, if you want to take notes, take tests or connect with your friends in Facebook, you need to login.
4. You guys must have forgotten signup button. How do I login?
There is no signup; but you must have a facebook account. You can sign up a new account in the prompt provided. In the future we might allow other ways to connect also, but right now we want to restrict to just facebook. Once you signed up for an account (in 2 minutes), just hit login and you will be prompted to allow connecting your profile with this site. Hit allow and you are done.
5. Will you guys do evil things to my facebook account?
No. We won't be using the connect to do anything to your profile. So chill. Except when you ask us to publish a course to your wall we won't touch anything in your facebook profile.
6. Hmm, videos don't appear. What to do?
Check if you have Adobe Flash plugin installed: Try going to YouTube.com and see if you can play any video there. If you cannot then most likely it is a plugin issue. Download flash plugin from: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/.
7. How many courses are there at present? I want numbers.
We have about 300 courses in 75 subjects organized under 10 top level departments. Out of these include 47 are from MIT, 33 from Stanford, 24 from Yale, 11 from UCLA, 22 from Berkeley and 36 from Indian Institutes of Technology.
8. I don't like a lot of junk courses. I want to see courses only from xyz university. How do I select courses by university?
Use the search button for this. Enter your university choice (MIT, Stanford,UCLA, IIT, etc) and hit go. You can see the various courses available from the university ordered by category.
9. I just see a bunch of numbers and broken links. What browsers do you support?
We support Internet Explorer 7 & 8, Firefox 3 and above, Google Chrome and Apple Safari 4. If you are using an older browser like IE 6, we suggest you upgrade to one of the modern ones.
10. Why does the page take this long to load?
Sorry for the delays. Sometimes there a lot of videos and images to load. We are working on optimizing the speed. We are just a startup and we learn fast.
11. What are the design principles? Why are there so many empty spaces?
Here are our design principles:
1. More choice doesn't mean better choice. As paradox of choice tells us people get intimidated when facing a barrage of choices. So, we abstracted content as much as possible and at any page you woudn't be required to make too many choices. You can see our course page simply abstracts dozens of videos in it, and the subject pages don't contain more than a dozen courses usually.
2. Empty space doesn't mean they need to get filled. In a lot of places we purposefully left off white spaces instead of filling it with irrelevant content.
3. Distraction is not good. We could add a lot more tools, relevant videos etc. But, we don't want to distract a student too much. Education needs concentration and focus, and we want to reduce randomization.
4. Connection improves education. Ask a MBA grad from a top school on why he paid those big bucks. Most likely the reply will be connections. Connections not just improve ur job chances, but gives you better quality of learning.
12. This FAQ is incomplete and you guys have not bothered to answer many of them. What do I need to do?
Mail us at admin [at] nalandau [dot] com and we will try to answer it. |
