Introducing Course Kudos: The IMDB of Online Learning
Tags: showdev
Published: 2020-03-26 10:30:45

In the fall of last year, a couple of months after I shut down my last side project, I was looking for what to build next. I had just finished a video course on how to build applications using Spring Boot and React to get a bit more background on the stack that my team (I'm work as a Product Manager) wanted to use for our newest project. I had also listened to a couple of  podcasts about people building courses and learning communities, as well as seen a colleague of mine share a good video course in our company Slack channel.

Those signals and the experience of having struggled myself to, among a huge offering, decide what course to buy when I was interested in learning something new,  all came together and made sparked a question in me.  Why is there no central place for finding, tracking, rating good learning resources?

Of course all big learning platforms have their own rating systems, but they all differ from one-another. This makes it very hard to do cross-platform comparisons. On top of that, there's a lot of independent course creators out there, as well as a high-quality free content.

That was it, my next side-project! About 2 months later, I launched [Course Kudos](https://www.coursekudos.com/). After adding a couple of additional improvements, it's time to introduce it to more people and hopefully get some feedback as to where to take the project next.

## What do you want to learn and how?

![Course Kudos - Search and filter learning resources on a topic](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/0wutkfhxo42v4kipioj2.png)

Course Kudos is structured around topics. They get added as tags to learning resources. Every topic has a page that lists resources to help you learn it. Learning resources have a type like book, video course, article etc. as well as a pricing type and platform. These taxonomies can be used to filter the list of resources and to also help you find how you prefer to learn.

## Give kudos to your favorite teachers


![Course Kudos - Review form](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/3kk41usm9mxl8whs2a89.png)

If you come across some great learning content, that taught you something valuable and/or develop yourself in a meaningful way, you can help the teacher and peers by leaving a great review. Likewise, if you just spent a bunch of money on a course that didn't meet expectations, you can flag this for others as well.

## Track and share what you've learned

![Course Kudos - Profiles help you keep track and showcase your personal development](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/s6ky5njaat7xduxrrc7q.png)Your profile lists all resources that you have reviewed and can be used to show your boss, future boss, client or simply yourself that you always keep learning and improving yourself in meaningful ways.

## Any feedback?

The website is very much in an MVP stage at this point and I have so many idea's for new features. However, before I get to those, I want to hear your feedback. Below questions are of particular interest.

Let me know what you think on Twitter [@shinyventures](https://twitter.com/shinyventures) or via email [nick@coursekudos.com](mailto:nick@coursekudos.com).

For students:
 - How do you decide what to learn next?
 - How do you decide what course to buy?
 - How do you keep track of good learning content? 
 - How do you share good content with peers?

For teachers:
 - How do you collect feedback from your students?
 - How do you find new students for your course?