dhawalhs

I have been running a search engine for online courses for the last 15 years: https://www.classcentral.com/

The current catalog covers 100+ providers, 1000+ universities, and 250,000+ courses.

Originally a weekend side project that I first shared with the world here on HN itself on Nov 29, 2011 [1]. Currently bootstrapped and profitable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3288775#3289393

Class Central | Educator / Subject Matter Expert (YouTube) | Part-time | Remote | [https://www.classcentral.com](https://www.classcentral.com)

I'm looking for experienced educators, industry practitioners, and subject matter experts who want to teach live workshops on YouTube. We're launching an experiment: grow our YouTube channel by focusing only on intermediate-to-advanced topics.

Class Central helps tens of millions of learners find the best courses. Small team (6 people), profitable, independent, 13+ years.

This is genuinely experimental. You plan and lead live workshops on subjects you know deeply. Any domain works. We promote them to our audience, and we figure out together what clicks.

I would like to skip the content farm tactics and beginner stuff. I just want to offer solid teaching for people ready to learn challenging subjects.

[email protected]

Class Central | Senior Full Stack Engineer | Remote | https://www.classcentral.com

I'm looking for a senior engineer to take ownership (from me) of Class Central's codebase and infrastructure.

We help tens of millions of learners find the best courses on any subject. Small team (6 people), profitable, independent, and around for 13+ years. No VC drama, just sustainable growth.

Stack: PHP 8+, Symfony 7+, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Google Cloud. We keep it simple and productive.

Own the full stack, help shape our product, and build pragmatic solutions for our current scale. I am looking for product-minded engineers who are focused on user experience and driven to understand the business.

I'm building a new cross-functional product team from scratch (engineering, product, design). Looking for a foundational engineer who can mentor, collaborate, and help define how we work together.

Remote-first, async, very few meetings. Real autonomy, real impact. Fair warning: being fully remote means no annual Halloween Heists.

While I don't have a formal job post up yet, if you're at that point where this feels like the right next step, I'd be happy to hear from you: [email protected]

Class Central | Developer Education Specialist (Course Guide Author) | Remote (Global) | Full-time | We’re the most popular search engine for online courses, and we’re hiring a deeply technical writer-researcher to help learners master tech skills by testing advanced courses and publishing “best course” guides.

You’ll: research, test, and evaluate courses (e.g., LangChain, DevSecOps, Nginx, pen-testing) and write clear, actionable guides with charts/images/layouts.

You are: a curious polyglot learner and clear writer, fluent with the command line, and comfortable driving projects in a remote team.

How we work: full-time, remote-first, async, very few meetings; we’re profitable and independent so you can ship fast and have real impact.

AI policy: AI can speed you up, but this is hands-on research and writing—you find and test the best courses yourself (not a prompt-engineering role).

Process: application review → paid writing test → interview with founder → paid trial → decision.

Apply: https://www.classcentral.com/about/careers/developer-educati...

Good to know.

Makes sense since B2B is an extension of their B2C catalog. But they seem to be hiring a lot of sales people, so I was not sure if they are profitable or not.

I think their B2C business is profitable, but online degrees and B2B isn't.

If anybody is interested, last year I wrote a detailed report [1] on Coursera's monetization journey. I describe the steps and experiments the company did to go from zero to $100+ million in revenues (and potentially over $200 million this year).

In my opinion, of all the online education providers Coursera grew the most during the pandemic. They also reacted well by offering free certificates and giving free access to their catalog to college students [2].

My company Class Central [3], a Tripadvisor for online education grew a lot during the pandemic. In the second half of March, we received 5 million visitors, almost a 20x increase. Though no longer the peak, we are still at 2.5X of what we were before.

1. https://www.classcentral.com/report/coursera-monetization-re...

2. https://www.classcentral.com/report/mooc-providers-response-...

3. https://www.classcentral.com/

The two degrees in the articles are examples of "MOOC-based degrees". These are launched by MOOC providers like Coursera, edX, and FutureLearn.

In all 50+ such degrees have been announced [1]. ~30 of these were announced in 2018, but there was a slow down in 2019 with only 11 announced [2].

A majority of degrees tend to be Master's, but there are few bachelors. Most recently Coursera announced that their Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of London had 2,000+ students enrolled. It was announced last year and costs 10,088 – 15,132 GBP.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Class Central, a Tripadvisor for Online Education. But we also write about the MOOC industry in depth.

[1] https://www.classcentral.com/report/mooc-based-masters-degre...

[2] https://www.classcentral.com/report/moocs-stats-and-trends-2...

Coursera for Campus for the time being is free. You need to ask your school to apply: https://www.coursera.org/campus/

EdX also has something similar.

I would personally recommend Learning how to Learn!

Here is a list of all Coursera courses sorted by ratings: https://www.classcentral.com/provider/coursera?sort=rating-u...

You can also filter by subjects i.e Computer Science, Data Science. Humanities, Mathematics, etc.

Disclaimer: I am the founder.

A few reviews from last year's edition of Startup School: https://www.classcentral.com/course/independent-startup-scho...

Disclaimer: Self plug

Thanks! We have scrapers running daily for all the major providers. The rest we collect manually on a schedule. We have been around for a while, so in many cases the providers or instructors reach out to us directly. Sorry, but it is not open data.

You can find reviews for these courses here: https://www.classcentral.com/starting-this-month

It's the same list, but more comprehensive.

Actually, it wasn't generated by hand. I/Class Central generated it for OpenCulture. Here is a more comprehensive list, with filtering: https://www.classcentral.com/starting-this-month

The slide says just that people have bought stuff they found on "Social Media". Doesn't mention that these are through ads or any indication of "Facebook ads genuinely add value though".