Crash courses, Humans, and Mindspace

Remember the first time calculus made sense? Or better, think about all the ‘aha’ moments you had since school or the day you started realizing that you are indeed a mass of flesh called the brain that is orchestrating a mesh of dependent bio-frameworks to consume information. Sounds quite joyful, right?

That right there is one of the most rewarding experiences you could get as a human being. To know something! To unravel a complex pattern or logic, understand what it is all about, develop on it, and pass that information to another human.

Together, we’ve been trying to simplify this whole domain of learning and teaching in so many ways, especially online. Wikis (I created something on that! Check swyde!), coursewares, interactive explainers, animations, online communities, IM groups, and the list goes on.

Every experiment works on one core principle. To express a notion, as simple as possible.

A crash course is one way to do that. It’s simple. Easy to consume. Covers most age groups. And it’s efficient and effective.

Regular courseware on MOOC platforms and universities do help students and professionals by providing them with academically disciplined knowledge. But for a casual self-learner, it’s unnecessarily complicated, lengthy, video-centric, and mostly paywalled with irrelevant hoops to just understand a topic they love to.

For such independent self-learners, I created a crash course platform that refreshes the idea of an online course into its elemental component—just the information in its textual form.

• As straightforward crash courses.
• With contained and compartmentalized lessons with a dedicated discussion space for each.
• And without any unnecessary components like assignments, quizzes, enrolments, or nothing whatsoever that would take a learner’s attention away from their goal.

I call it the Mindspace. A peaceful and relaxed space to learn and share knowledge efficiently.

Each Mindspace lesson and the associated discussion space has an intentional character limit of 3000. This restriction forces the creator to simplify and untangle his knowledge to its elements so the lessons stay true to the definition of a crash course.

And to retain the authorship of the creators and preserve their selfless communal interests at the same time, all creations at Mindspace will be licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International Licence. This makes all crash courses (and the discussions that follow) reusable for all non-commercial initiatives everywhere.

If you are a creator or an educator, you can signup at https://mindspace.arclind.com/accounts/signup now. As an early contributor, your contributions will be recognized as the Mindspace creative community grows.

If you’d like to support this project or join Arclind, I’d love to hear about that. You can find me at [email protected] and here.

Update, September 2020: Mindspace Version 2 is live. Along with crash courses, we now have another component for insights. Check out sparks! A new feature to share your ‘aha’ moments with the world.