Don't work with Educative

Educative Inc, according to their website educative.io, is "the ultimate learning platform for software developers". I've tried to work with them as a course author and it's been a total disaster. This post describes my experience, so that other authors interested in publishing their courses on Educative will know what to expect.

I'm the author of the book SQL Window Functions Explained. It has 56 interactive exercises, so I thought it should be a good fit for an online course, and after some research, I contacted Educative. Some time later, I received a reply from Hassan, who introduced themself as a member of the "Author Acquisition" team. They said that Educative was indeed interested in turning my book into a course.

The first surprise was when Hassan categorically stated that I couldn't develop the course myself. This could only be done by another team at Educative called "Author Success" (these guys just love big names). Your house, your rules, I thought.

The second surprise was the whole communication process with Hassan. They answered my emails once a week, never earlier. Sometimes they would disappear for a few weeks. At one point, I even had to contact Educative support to kindly ask them to remind Hassan of my existence. After that, Hassan reappeared in my inbox, still replying once a week.

After 2.5 months of this slow-burning bromance, Hassan announced that Educative was ready to sign a contract with me and transfer me to the "Author Success" team that would supposedly start working on the course. After this important milestone in our correspondence, Hassan disappeared for good, never to be seen again.

A month later, I was contacted by Amina, another member of the "Author Acquisition" team at Educative. Amina told me that Educative was ready to sign a contract (again) and even provided a link. After reviewing the contract, I signed it and Amina disappeared without a word.

Another month passed, and (guess what) I was contacted by the same Amina, who told me that no one at Educative had bothered to click the "sign" button on the contract in the past month, so it had expired. Would you be so kind as to sign it again, Amina told me.

At this point, I was pretty fed up with Educative. It's been 5 months and we haven't made any progress. As my last attempt, I contacted Fahim ul Haq (who seems to be the CEO of Educative) directly on Twitter. Of course they ignored me.

And that was it.

I will never work with Educative again. And neither should you.

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