We are launching a marketplace of live low-cost online marketplace of technical courses covering topics in; data science, analytics, data engineering, software engineering, no-code and product management. The objective of this post is to gain an understanding of the pain points you encounter learning technical skills online and getting a better understanding of whether our value proposition as it currently stands offers a substantial enough value as we believe.

Live
One of the biggest pain points I struggled with was getting direct feedback from an instructor live. Having tried MOOCs, bootcamps, gamified code platforms, online universities and self-learning to name a few; I found myself learning far more effectively when I had a mentor. I found that it wasn't necessarily about having a 1 v 1 mentor and moreso about having live tutorials weekly with an experienced (I was learning data science) Data Scientists. This enabled me to ask questions, get immediate personalized feedback, have concepts broken down to me in a manner more tailored to my understanding and have a measuring stick to gauge my progress. Because of this I learnt a lot more from the traditional online bootcamp type model which gave me this experience.

Courses on our platform offer this level of personalization.

Learning in small groups
In addition to this, we believe learning happens best when individuals are put in small groups of peers working towards the same goal (same learning goal) because this encourages greater collaboration, peer to peer learning and just far more engagement. I personally don't have a problem with learning on my own, but I do find learning in groups far more engaging and motivating. The more engaged I am, the more fun I have learning, the more time I spend learning and ultimately the more I learn.

Courses created by senior professionals
We don't create the courses ourselves. We already have a marketplace of senior talent across the continent and in some cases in the US. We believe enabling senior talent to create courses results in substantially more practical courses based on skills actually used in the work space.

Low-Cost
I personally greatly believe in making personalized human touch online education as accessible as possible; blending the personalization of platforms like Lambda School while retaining the commodified marketplace type model (ie. Udemy) that also enables you to follow you curiosity as opposed to getting into a 6-12 month commitment sometimes having to re-learn things you already understand, while keeping this as affordable to as many people as possible. We aim to have courses starting as low as $10.

Project Based
It goes without saying that every course must include a project (you will get feedback on this). I strongly believe Learning a technical skill without applying it through a project is superficial at best.


Interested in learning more about;
i. whether this value proposition resonates with you, specifically, is this a learning format that you believe would accelerate your learning progress
ii. what kind of courses are you specifically looking to learn?
iii. how valuable would you find personalized study plans; giving you a list of recommended courses on our platform based on understanding what your objectives are (ie. our data science team would recommend what courses you should do after finding out what you want to achieve)

Let's chat. We already have a few pilot courses running, but want to accelerate our learning process to build a better experience for everyone and ultimately build a platform with multitude of courses aimed at upskilling Africans with highly scalable skills