The Top Floor Flat

I mentioned about a week ago that some of the Spoonfed team met up with the awesomely entitled London startup, School of Everything. Now that I had heard about them from my boss, had a chance to take a quick look at their website, and seen their blog post about teapots, I decided it was time to take a better look at the site and the see what I could learn at the School of Everything.

Here’s the run down: School of Everything (SoE from now on) has the brilliant proposition of allowing anyone to teach anything to anyone else. From their About Us page (which seems to have some formatting errors on the page but it might be my computer), “Everyone has something to learn. Everyone has something to teach.” Instead of limiting their userbase by trying to be city specific (not necessarily an illogical option but regardless one they decided not to take) they have members from all over the world, making it likely that you’ll be able to find someone nearby – although whether or not they want to teach what you want to learn is yet to be seen at this point. As a student, you can connect with teachers and read their profile, course descriptions and background. As a teacher, you can define your area of expertises, set your hourly rate, and advertise your classes all for free. The site is still growing and has only been in its current incarnation since Sept 1.

First impressions:

To begin with, I had to admit their homepage could use a bit of sprucing up – it wasn’t the most visually engaging thing I’ve seen on the web. Fortunately my main criteria was met in that it was easy to navigate, understand, and find the signup button. I also liked the homepage feature where I could see “new faces” with some of the most recent registrants (and either everyone adds a photo or SoE has cleverly chosen only to show users who add a photo). There was a tag cloud that had “Recent Subjects” although I would have preferred to see a list of what people had recently signed up to teach, and maybe a few lines about their offered courses.

Registration and profile setup:

After the simple signup process (I love startups – no one has the username Meaghan yet), I was ready to start adding subjects to my profile. I had signed up as a student, feeling that even if I did want teach Londoners how to make chocolate cake, shop on a budget and blog, I just wouldn’t have the time.

From the profile page, a simple text box allowed me to enter any subject I wanted to learn. I quickly discovered that typing a few letters would give me a drop down box of suggestions (so, typing baking gave me the options of baking, cake baking and home baking) that others had added. This did make things a bit confusing – for example, I tried to enter “piano” and saw half a dozen options including Piano., classical piano, piano and piano lessons. I picked a number of popular subjects (yoga, cooking, piano), some less popular ones (marketing, swing dance) and then created a new subject I wanted to learn (time travel – just testing the system here!).

As soon as I added a new subject, it appeared in my profile along with the number of other people who wanted to learn and the number of teachers available. This is a fantastic feature, and I really appreciated knowing right away that there was no one registered for the site who could teach me time travel so I didn’t have to waste my time searching the site or hoping to get contacted.

Finding a teacher:

Clicking on the number of teachers brought me to a page of everyone registered as a teacher of that subject. I started with piano which had an encouraging 70 teachers but discovered that this listed all teachers on the site – not the ones in my area (to be fair, there were 27 in London so I’m set if I want to learn piano). For the smaller subjects, however, such as marketing, of the 13 instructors only two were in London.

Upon selecting one of the teachers, I was taken to their teaching profile which listed all of the courses they could teach. From here, I had the option of bookmarking the teacher as a contact (although it took me a while to figure out where this saved him – into the contacts pages of my profile) or messaging them to, presumably, set up a lesson.

Thoughts and future features:

I really like learning stuff so I was pretty much guaranteed to like this website. It’s got a lot of potential and what it really needs at this point is enough of a userbase to make it legitimately useful. I can also see the opportunity for encouraging very niche subjects to gain a following (I didn’t see any Chessboxing classes yet!). The other thing I’d like to see with SoE is a simpler option for setting up lessons. Give the teachers a calendar on their profile and let people fill up time slots (this would need some form of confirmation but could also let others see how popular a teacher is). What about reviews and performance reports? Can students get report cards on their profile? Can teachers get recommendations?

Right now, SoE is a bit of a glorified Gumtree or Craigslist for teachers. But it has all of the tools in place to be a great resource for, well, Everything. I’m really looking forward to seeing this site after a few thousand more Londoners sign up. Who knows, I might even find someone to teach me time travel.

Check out The School of Everything.