Using Hive to create online courses?

With the liotes project we are working on a project that we briefly presented at hive fest. We would like to create a funnel with online courses where we would offer a solution to a certain problem to a specific category of people. This would be a free course where people could sign up to and where they would also create a hive account in the process.

What we need in order to build this course

What we need to build such a funnel is not that complicated. We would need:

• a squeeze page where people can opt-in to the course
• a service that collects the e-mail addresses and automatically sends the people an e-mail with a link to the online course
• the online course itself that supports video and text content

The concept would include a squeeze page where people sign up for the course. After verifying their e-mail address, they would then receive an e-mail with the link to the course. The advantage of collecting the e-mail address is that it would be possible to contact these people over and over again. Once they start the course, they would go step by step, through the course and they would learn how to solve the problem that we adress.

To build such a funnel, we were planning to subscribe to a portal that offers all the services that we need. The problem with that is that the subscriptions are quite expensive. According to the number of students, it would cost between 20 and 100$ per month and we simply don't know where to take this money from. Since these courses would be for free, there wouldn't be a way to finance it without taking money out of hive. This is something we simply don't want to do.

For the last couple of weeks, I have been thinking about it and I've realised that to promote hive we should use hive as much as possible. It's not really possible to build a squeeze page on hive simply because it's not possible to include iframes. It seems that inleo offers this service but only with a premium subscription. There again, we want to avoid any fix costs while building this project.

Yesterday, I believe I've found the solution for the squeeze page. I've been a member of the website Leadsleap for a long time. The free version of this platform allows you to create squeeze pages and it also comes with a free e-mail service. Thanks to that the problem of the squeeze page and the e-mail service is covered without generating any costs.

Building the online course directly on hive

Now, the next question is how to build an online course. I've researched many services and I've come to the realisation that what we actually need is an online space where we can host video and text and where people can navigate between the lessons of the course. I've come to the realisation that it would be stupid to pay for such a service because we have all that on hive already! We have free webspace, free storage and we don't have to bother about server space, cookie management and so on.

How the course would look like on hive

So basically, I've started to build a template on hive that would be used for each lesson. I would integrate a course completion progress bar that shows for each lesson where people stand in the course. There would then be the content in the video form and below the same in text form. I've recently realised that to touch as many people as possible, it's important to give both text and video versions.

In between, there would also be a navigation field with a button that leads to the previous lesson, a button that leads to the next lesson and also another one where people can go to the main page of the course with the curriculum and the learning objectives.

I've been working on a first layout using the fonts and colours of the Liotes project and I think it doesn't look to bad.

How to create the content

So the next step would now be to create one by one the lessons of this course and then publish them as posts on hive. The question that I've asked myself now is what account to use to do so. Since the first course will probably be composed by around 10-15 lessons, it's not really good to use one of our major accounts of liotes. The autovotes on these accounts would be problematic. So probably we would use a specific account to create this course that hasn't published anything so far and therefore wouldn't trigger any autovotes.

Quite a good solution

When I look at the work that is required to set up the course, it's definitely a bit more than if we were using a specialised software. However it is greatly compensated by the fact that the course wouldn't cost us a dime to set up and host. Also we can rely on hive that it will always be available and editable on the blockchain.

If we manage to build a working course on hive like that, it could be the first of many others. This could be just one more great use case for the hive blockchain...

Please consider supporting our Witness nodes:

• Liotes Hive Witness
• Liotes Hive-Enginge Witness