One of my worst mistakes in life was accepting an Educative contract which cost me months of my time. Educative.io is a great platform with awesome content. Do check it out if you haven't. It's also built on the belief that reading is faster than watching videos. It also enjoys a solid reputation among coders.
In this post i'd be drawing attention to some points which you might consider before signing a contract with Educative. This is not exactly a bad review of the platform, but sheds some light on contract termination.
You might end up writing the course 3 times.
Educative has 3 review rounds:
- The Grammarly round
Where a Grammarly report is sent which also checks for plagiarism. This is a great initiative, but, the reviewer might ask you to change some wordings as you copied a definition as is. Well, if a canonical reference cannot be referenced, this is weird.
- The casual review
In this round of review lots of comments are given. Some pretty useless. Among the three reason for terminating my contract, it was stated:
- Some illustrations were blurred and were asked to be replaced. Unfortunately, they still have not been rectified.
This concerned screenshots like this one:
Sorry Educative, i cannot unblur a screenshot!
- The formal review
This is a phase where they send you a Google docs with edits to be made. Mine, for the quarter milestone had 20+ pages. Yes, 20+ pages of things to correct for only a quarter of my course!
Don't give them the best of yourself
If you write a stuffed, code-intensive course, you are digging a hole for yourself as you will have to deal with the 3 rounds of reviews for each chapter of the course.
Getting penalized for a buggy Docker system
One of the 3 points stated:
Some of the applications in the course are still not working despite numerous revisions and author calls where all issues were addressed and appropriate solutions were provided.
It's true the apps were not working but why? I was writing a Flask course. And how do i know that they don't support basic things as redirection?
Clipping out redirect for render_template is a senseless thing to do in a Flask course.
There are times when a lib version was out of date but there were lots of platform issues.
At last they even forgot why i was waiting. I reminded them.
And yes, there are lots of stuffs
Conclusion
Educative made me a better writer, definitely! But, communication is quite weird and is a waste of time if you are writing many apps for them. It cost me a lot of opportunities and it's a great feeling not having to deal with senseless, unpractical reviews at scale!
This is my opinion, you are free to have a shot at it.
Refs:
The full mail
Hi Abdur-Rahmaan,
I hope this email finds you well.
As you know, your course was undergoing our Formal Review process. After thorough consideration, our team has decided that we will not be moving forward with the course as it does not meet our quality standards.
Here are the key reasons we have taken this decision:
- Some of the applications in the course are still not working despite numerous revisions and author calls where all issues were addressed and appropriate solutions were provided.
Some illustrations were blurred and were asked to be replaced. Unfortunately, they still have not been rectified.
Many of the points repeatedly mentioned were not addressed but were crossed out in the document. Moreover, any questions asked were not answered either/ For example, It was requested to run Grammarly across the entire course to correct any typos and grammatical errors. Unfortunately, this is still not done.
We value all your efforts till now, and we highly appreciate the time that you have spent on this course.
Please consider this an official termination of our contract.
Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. I wish you all the best in your future goals.
As for checked but requirements not met, it's solved according to me, so i check it. If it's deemed not met by the reviewer, then, they need to communicate why!
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