Mr. Karnjanaprakorn (Photo: About.Me)

The Principal of New York

Before Mayor Bloomberg signed up for Codecademy, before General Assembly signed its first lease in the Flatiron—even before Peter Thiel started paying kids to skip school—Skillshare founder and CEO Mike Karnjanaprakorn was trying convince New York investors to finance his peer-to-peer learning startup. He billed the company as the Etsy of education, since it set up a market for anyone to teach—and learn—practical skills through an affordable hands-on class, starting at $25 a night. (The hybrid online classes that Skillshare launched this August, with Livestream office hours, start at just $20 a night.)

But in 2010, two years before The New York Times dubbed 2012, “The Year of the MOOC” (massive open online course), venture capitalists weren’t biting. As with hardware and clean tech, investors begged off education—burned by one too many startups shut out by the gatekeepers of traditional K through 12 and higher ed. “Some of my favorite notes that we got from investors were, ‘We don’t think education is a big market,’ ‘We think education is a shrinking market’ and ‘We don’t think people enjoy learning at all after they graduate,’” he said. “‘You have to get a master’s in education before you can teach,’ was another.”

Economic realities like persistent unemployment, mounting student debt and an army of jobless graduates without the skills to fill open positions quickly proved otherwise. The time was right for Skillshare’s modernized approach. Through its online platform, the company promotes the classes, procures students, processes credit cards and books rooms for in-person offerings—often in a tech company’s lounge or lecture hall—all in exchange for a percentage of the sales.

In the early days, Mr. Karnjanaprakorn, whose previous employer Hot Potato was acquired by Facebook, and his co-founder Malcolm Ong, a product manager at game-maker OMGPOP, gravitated toward the kind of programming and entrepreneurship classes they wanted to take, like Mr. Karnjanaprakorn’s popular course, “Launch Your Startup Idea for Less Than $1,000.” As the Silicon Alley refrain goes, meeting tech people is easy: just take a Skillshare class and drop by General Assembly.

Skillshare’s emphasis on nonacademic classes with real-world application paved the way for other local players like CourseHorse, Lore and Codecademy. Signing up felt less like an indulgence than a practical necessity. “There’s a real-world application” to Skillshare classes, he said, “something that you could use immediately.” Headlines about an instructor quitting his day job with the $100,000 a year he made teaching Ruby on Rails to aspiring programmers helped attract instructors as well.

In 2012, the company expanded to other U.S. cities like San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles, and kicked off its large-scale online-only classes with an offering from Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson—a Skillshare investor—that reached 2,500 students all over the world. Mr. Karnjanaprakorn said that it would take him two years to teach that many students if he taught every week here in New York City.

Mr. Karnjanaprakorn compared making a case for accessible education outside of a university to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. “If the first phase is awareness and huge institutional change,” he told The Observer, “The second step is making something that will fix it or being a company that tries to solve it. I can feel that happening. It’s less about why should people learn. Nobody asks that question now anymore.”

Next: Rick Webb, Tumblr: The Undercover Ad Man

Back to the beginning

(Joey deVilla /http://www.joeydevilla.com)

Back in December, Art.sy's Daniel Doubrovkine announced he would be teaching a six-week class geared toward developers, assisted by Pivotal Labs’s Dimitri Roche, on the popular, powerful and lightweight scripting language and framework known as Ruby on Rails. The price, $2,800 a student, was on solid middle ground in the range of Ruby class pricing, but some local Rubyists sneered at the high price tag for a language that many learn on their own.

The class, held at General Assembly, filled up immediately anyway. Now that it's over, Mr. Doubrovkine took some time to reflect. Between lesson planning and grading, he estimated he worked on the class for 117 hours in total. He decided to use the experience to make a case for learning Ruby in the classroom and last week hosted one of the most well-attended NYC.rb meetups to date, called "Crafting a Ruby on Rails Course for Developers," in which he outlined his methods for creating the curriculum.

"Software education in the classroom is a thriving industry and the courses for Ruby-on-Rails vary greatly in structure and curriculum," the event's description read. "Strong opinions about the value of such classes have been heatedly expressed by NYC.rb members and we're eager to continue a constructive conversation during the meetup. In this talk, we will share our experience building a Ruby-On-Rails for Developers course, and go over the lessons learned when delivering this material to a class of 15 students of General Assembly."

The event concluded with student project demos and a discussion about how to improve the curriculum. "I've never seen so many people at NYC.rb!" Mr. Doubrovkine wrote in an email.

And good news: Mr. Doubrovkine has joined the ranks of the web's most generous teachers by releasing the class curriculum on General Assembly's Github account. The next morning, someone from the community had already made a small tweak. "Just some links fixed, but still a contribution from the open-source community!" he wrote.

Perhaps open-sourcing the class, which awards a certification upon completion, will satisfy some of the classroom skeptics in the self-deterministic Ruby community.

(generalassemb.ly)

Art.sy's Daniel Doubrovkine and Pivotal Labs's Dimitri Roche are teaching a six-week class on Ruby on Rails at General Assembly for $2,800. When Mr. Doubrovkine took to the NYC-rb mailing list to advertise, he was surprised by the pushback. "I don't want to put you down or sound like a jerk but any programmer should be able to learn Rails without paying $2,800," wrote Rubyist Kfir Shay. "Documentation is excellent, free online resources are plenty, community is strong etc."

"Funny, we're doing the same thing, except virtual, and for a nominal fee of $100 (which includes course textbook - Rails Tutorial PDF)," wrote Rubyist Chris Lee, pointing to http://railstutors.com.

"Sorry boys but this is a complete ripoff no matter who is paying or how you slice it. If you are going to be 'shamelessly advertising' on the list then it's __fair_play if you get some blowback from the list," wrote Rubyist Akshay Kumar, who outlined a self-taught curriculum with books that cost less than $100.

In general, hackers prefer hands-on education--just start building things--to classroom learning. New York Tech Meetup's Nate Westheimer taught himself Ruby by locking himself in the academic equivalent of a "sweat lodge" with a few books; Yipit's Vin Vacanti taught himself to code by building Yipit. There are scads of free resources on the internet for learning lightweight languages like Ruby and Javascript, and sites like Forrst and Github let programmers share their projects and learn from each other.

In defense of the original post, Rubyists pointed out that it would be ideal for developers at large corporations that could foot the bill--and that classroom learning is advantageous if the instructor is good enough and takes responsibility that the students get their money's worth.

The debate became increasingly heated, with Rubyists on both sides. One user, Dave Newton, wrote: "In any case, I'm done--nyc.rb is pretty much ruined for me, before my first in-person meetup, before I had a chance to contribute back."

Mr. Doubrovkine eventually hung his head. "Everyone, I am sorry I started this thread. I should know better," he said. The NYC-rb mailing list, like all internet-based forums, is known to erupt into fights every so often.

More broadly, Betabeat has been hearing some gripes about the price of classes at General Assembly. In a town of free to $10 meetups, General Assembly is running classes that cost hundreds to thousands of dollars. GA's founders are targeting big corporations who might want their employees to sharpen their skills and can afford to sign large checks, but it is clearly rubbing some members of the local tech community the wrong way.