First, new classes:

1. ryugi created Creative Writing, which begins April 2: “A fresh look at creative writing, accompanied with powerpoint presentations and prompts.”
2. Sine_Ira_Et_Studio created Roman Republic – Rise and Fall, which “examines the political, economic, institutional, social, and cultural history of Rome from its foundation until the end of the Roman Republic.”
3. teach2622, who has a BA in Anthropology from UMich, created An Introduction to Teaching in the Inner-City Public High School, which “is designed to instruct a new teacher in how to effectively teach in a very specific environment, the inner-city public middle/high school.”
4. aptfoto, who owns a photography studio, created Photography and Photoshop, which “will teach the basics on how to use your DSLR or Point and Shoot camera as well as the basics of Photoshop to create stunning images” and is to last eight weeks.
5. creepfeeteatmeat, published poet and current MFA candidate, started Narrative Poetry & Fiction Workshop, a “workshop setting course that will focus not only on getting feedback on your poetry and prose, but help the student develop their own critiquing skills.”
6. autotom is drawing on his CCNA certification to offer CCNA – Cisco Netowrking and Subnetting, which “is designed to assist people in completing their CCNA, either before or during study.”
7. nottoobadguy, who heads the /r/dailyprogrammer subreddit, created Programming for Non-programmers: an Introduction to Python and will conduct it in a subreddit.
8. Kaiko, a former DotA semi-pro, is teaching DotA 2 for Beginners and “will cover the very basics of DotA”.
9. Mikhaillost created Basic Logic and Reasoning For Busy People, a weekend-based class that will “[teach] you fallacies, whole thinking, induction and deduction, how to read scientific studies, choosing your sources and a couple other things that will come up in relation to these.”
10. pizzaguy, a Life Coach in Japan, will be teaching Hiragana in Beginning Japanese Writing.
11. EpicNoiseGuy - who is in his final year of a music production degree, has performed in major UK festivals, and produces and DJs Electro/Dubstep under the name of Epic Noise Guy – is offering An Introduction to Electronic Music Production.
12. chakrakhan, who is graduating in Spring 2012 with a bachelor’s in Philosophy and Mathematics, is offering Mind and Matter: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind, which “will survey philosophical ideas about the mind and knowledge, with special attention paid to the relationship between the mind and the natural world…. [and] will study philosophical ideas about the mind from Descartes to Dennett in an accessible manner.”

Quite an interesting and varied selection, isn’t it?

One might wonder what caused the sudden expansion of the UReddit catalog. The answer (aside from a lack of updates for a couple weeks) is that UReddit frontpaged on Reddit for a while, garnering about 200,000 pageviews over about 24 hours. The server was able to handle the strain, for the most part (though a few 502/504 errors did happen), and the UReddit community has expanded significantly. (A side effect of the large amount of traffic is that teacher’s class statistics are now cached and updated daily.)

In order to create more of a community feel and to make the site more accessible, UReddit is now optimized for mobile devices and has a discussion section on each class page (using the Disqus platform). There are no comments at the time of the writing of this blog post as the system was just implemented, but I encourage all of you to start using it to discuss the many new, current, and completed classes.

Follow @uofreddit on Twitter for timely updates and subscribe to/r/UniversityofReddit for discussion.

As for UReddit itself, this week brought a change in server software (from Apache to nginx) that greatly increases the load that our server can handle. Furthermore, we’ve upgraded our server to make room for the email inboxes of all the new users that have been registering. This week also brought the implementation of class statistics, which will be upgraded as more data is collected.

Follow @uofreddit on Twitter for timely updates and subscribe to /r/UniversityofReddit for discussion.

Statistics for a class are available only to the teacher(s) of that class; links can be found alongside links for editing a class, which is anywhere the class title is displayed – and, of course, the teacher admin panel.

“Education is a wonderful thing, but once you reach a certain point in life it does not become mandatory. Some people take this to mean that they are free from being involved with educational institutions, whereas others feel the constant need to want to continue to grow and learn.

Reddit, not particularly well known for increasing productivity, can in fact be a venue of such growth and insight if you look in the right places. One such place in particular is known as The University of Reddit, a completely volunteer developed and run site for those wanting to share their insight with people who choose to continue learning.

This past month (and some of January too) I had the privilege of developing a course about online communities based on my two years of research during my communications masters program, and the results were quite surprising. I came into the planning process trying to decide if I want to pursue teaching, and left the course with a completely different perspective.

Personally I have always been interested in sharing knowledge, but the University of Reddit allows anyone to do, to anyone in the world, and at their leisure. Not to mention it’s free, besides the time you provide or take from it. As a result of my course I was able to connect with some fantastic guest speakers (reddit’s General Manager, and two very awesome people from Govloop) who also wanted to share their insight with the world. The classes were small and the technology I chose to use was a new challenge, but as a result I have another skill set and can say I was able to teach people what I love.

In addition to meeting great like minded individuals and students I was even asked to provide a guest lecture for a class at the University of Maryland, which is even more interesting because a dean there is incredibly well known and influential towards online community research. As a result of taking a chance, and sharing my time with others it opened a few more doors to me.

With that said I would highly suggest that if you have any interest in teaching the world anything, and I mean anything (it can be how to carve a pumpkin, gender studies, metaphysics or biology) take a moment to consider teaching through the U of R.”

1. Psykhattak created the class From Page to Stage to be conducted via a subreddit: “We’ll choose one to two plays as a class and then analyze it through the eyes of the production team and the actors.”.
2. vagueabond created the class Introduction to Handywrite Shorthand, which will also be conducted via a subreddit: “Handywrite is a phonetic shorthand alternative writing system. The aim of this course is to introduce Redditors to shorthand as a tool for writing notes, improving efficiency or just plain doing something fun.”
3.  xdeathr3v3rx created Basic Hockey, which is set to start on 5 March 2012 and whose material will be distributed via a blog.

Other updates:

1. Learn to Play Bridge has started and is waiting on a couple people to catch up in order to start playing. The instructor has competed on the worldwide level – how often will you get this chance? Check it out!
2. Introduction to Autodesk inventor had its first lecture.
3. Insect Identification had its first lecture over Ventrilo. Unfortunately, the UReddit Ventrilo server was misconfigured and the discussion had to be held on an alternate server; the UReddit server has been fixed and is now operational.
4. Painting a still life in oil is off to start. Get some paints and join! Haven’t we all wanted to learn to paint at some point? Join before it becomes difficult to catch up.
5. The next problem and solution sets for Intro to Group Theory have been posted. The lectures are all on YouTube, so it’s not too late to join, and the instructor is very accessible.

For real-time updates, follow @uofreddit; for discussion and interest checks for new classes, subscribe to /r/UniversityofReddit.

First, the newest redesign of the website is now live. Hopefully you will agree that it looks better. It also brings a basic activity feed on user pages and the ability to up-/downvote classes. Adding a classes automatically upvotes it for you, and dropping it downvotes it unless its class status is “finished”. An important note is that the front page now only displays active classes; completed classes will be listed in the new UReddit Archive.

New classes:

1. mbern28, who is “a third year Aerospace Engineering and Mechanical Engineering double major at the University of California at Davis” started Introduction to Autodesk Inventor to introduct students to the Autodesk Inventory package, which he has used “to model a plane for [his] school aerospace SAE team”. The class will begin 26 February.
2. anastas started Introduction to Web Development with HTML/CSS and has already put up three PDFs.
3. delibaltas, who has competed competitively in European and world bridge tournaments, has started Learn to Play Bridge. Check the class page for links to his competitive record and to the class subreddit he is using.
4. JMartin started Painting a Still Life in Oil. He has used UReddit’s filehosting service to put up a simple website for his class. The class page notes (that complete the class): “A panel of judges will critique your work. Evaluating the steps you have taken to get where you are in your painting, and giving you input on your development. This panel is comprised of professional artists, art educators, and art students.”

Other updates:

1. thejournalizer completed his Online Communities 101 class, which is now listed in the UReddit Archive.
2. fryinpanman continues to update his cooking class. Make sure to subscribe to his subreddit to get updates!
3. Sebatinksy is one video away from completing his Intro to Swordplay: 17th Century Italian Fencing class.
4. SchurThing continues to post problem sets and solutions for this Intro to Group Theory class. All of the video lectures for the class are already up on his YouTube channel; if you have an interest in higher mathematics, it isn’t too late to join!

For updates as they happen, follow @uofreddit on Twitter; for discussion, subscribe to /r/UniversityofReddit (there are a few potential classes being discussed there now as an interest check!)

You will be given an SFTP account to use for uploading and managing your class files. You can access your account using any SFTP client, examples of which are WinSCP (for Windows) and Cyberduck (for Mac OS X).

Any class that has class files uploaded through this system will automatically display a “[class files]” link alongisde the “[class page]” link in its catalog listings and class page; this link will take you to the publicly-available list of files which are managed using your SFTP account. You can use it simply to serve files to link to other people, or you can upload HTML files to make a simple website. All that is asked is that you are reasonable with disk space usage and that you do not use it for personal or illegal uses.

1. UReddit webmail using your email address as your username and using your regular UReddit password;
2. Email client such as Thunderbird, Outlook, Mail.app, &c using the IMAP-SSL / SMTP-SSL settings in the bulleted list below;
3. Gmail’s POP checker, using the POP3 / SMTP-SSL settings listed below; or
4. Set up a forwarding address on your user settings page.

Login details:

• Username: [your username]@ureddit.com
• Password: your regular UReddit password
• Server: ureddit.com
• POP3 incoming port: 110
• IMAP-SSL incoming port: 993
• SMTP-SSL outgoing port: 465
• SMTP authentication: same username and password as above

In any case, this is the first of many new features to come now that there is an acceptable site codebase to work with. The next feature on the slate is teacher statistics to keep track of class vieweship and add/drop rates and other related numbers. Stay tuned!