E-learning is a truly virgin soil. No one has conquered it. It is at a free-for-all Wild West land grab stage.
E Learning Web Sites
http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/1/khan-academy-checkbook-scaling-to-6-million-users-a-month-on.html
But YouTube is not interactive and a big part of what they want to do is present a learning tree to users, give quizzes, manage results, etc. So they first tried a self hosted Java based site, which was crushed under the load.
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The more control you get the more likely you are to shoot yourself in the foot and do something wrong
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They don’t carry pagers, don’t worry about replication, don’t have to restart instances, and don’t apply OS patches. There are a lot of things they don’t have to do with GAE.
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Khan Academy has successfully leveraged App Engine to scale to millions of users without hiring a single sysadmin or spending too much time worrying about anything ops-related
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To deploy the site, any developer (or our friendly CI bot) can simply run our "deploy.py" and wait a few minutes, then get back to spending time on the product. We haven't had to think once about whether or not the database can handle the write load we throw at it; the App Engine Datastore is uniquely worry-free in that regard.
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Offload as much work as you can to somebody else ie. GAE.
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At a group size of 2 - 5 people don’t focus on scalability issues. Focus on features. Make your product great. Get people coming back to it.
Keep things simple both technically and in the product until you know absolutely what you need to build. A lot of the features they’ve built to solve and edge case turned out to cause real problems in the long run. It’s hard to turn things off once you build them.
Be lazy. Use other people’s tools. Until your business is doing really well don’t be afraid to use other people’s work
E Learning
I watched the Khan app just 1 or 2 min and reached that conclusion. I regretted my hasty conclusion. Now I have seen
http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/depth-first-traversals-of-binary-trees/934024358
and
https://github.com/Khan
And I arrive at the same conclusion, with a higher degree confidence.
I have a blog, but why bother promoting my blog.
Superior E Learning and Feature Release
A current online learning app typically has about 500 features. Combine the best/top 5, you get about 900.
I can easily think up 20,000 features.
But will users find all of them desirable? e.g. Vary your lessons according to learner's learning/cognitive styles? What does NLP say about a student looking up/down or right/left? We can capture user's eyes and gesture with Kinect, or some other game SDK's, but should I?
So, I number such features Feature Number 10,001 etc.
What does Vygotsky say, Shaolin monks say, Feynman say, James Watson say, Carl Jung say ...... ?
Ok, Features Number 12,001 and 3 and 4.
A journey of 20,000+ features starts with 3 features, huh, so lonely! So exciting!
Whatever it takes, anything within morality bounds, ... I can and will dance, sing, talk, cajole, threaten, plead, .... code, test, deploy, design, debug, refactor, prefactor, re-architect, .. ok ... ok till it becomes World Class!
