How to Start a School With Your Friends

We've taught over 100 classes to over 1000 students 🤓

FractalU is a “school” for adults, taught from living rooms in New York City. We’ve run over 100 classes and taught thousands of students. Classes meet weekly and are held on evenings and weekends, since most of our students and teachers are working professionals.

Here's a small sampling of our recent courses:

• Improvisational Indian Cooking

• Serious Comedy

• Basics of Computational Biology

• Writing Fiction

We teach out of our homes, and keep the administrative burden low. That way, teachers can offer their classes at affordable rates. And adult students can make taking classes and learning new skills a regular part of our lives.

How It Started…

A few years ago, Mari dropped a message in the group chat. She was going through Andrej Karpathy's online course on AI …did anyone want to take it with her?

It turned out that several other friends were also going through the course. A plan was soon hatched: my friends would meet weekly to watch the lectures and hack on the homework together. They'd do it in person at merlins place, our friend’s apartment which doubles as a community third space.

Mari and Morgan give a presentation.

The average self-paced online course has a completion rate of 5-15%. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of enrolling in a self-paced course only to drop it midway through. Maybe, like me, you even spent money on an online course only to drop out.

It turns out, if you meet up with friends every week to take a course, two things happen:

1. You have a lot of fun

2. The average completion rate skyrockets

My friends discovered that the true value of school is the social container. The best classes in the world are freely available online. But going through an online class alone requires willpower that many of us don't have. It’s easy and fun to do focused work when you’re doing it with your friends! And to come back every week until you finish what you set out to do.

You Can Just Learn With Your Friends

One of the participants in this weekly event was my husband Andrew. Considering how enjoyable and useful the container proved to be, Andrew wondered: why aren't we taking classes with our friends regularly?

Thus began FractalU: a low-overhead low-cost “school” where we learn with our friends, from our living rooms.

The first semester of FractalU we ran 4 classes. Two classes continued with this model of co-learning by taking an online course together. But a few of us wanted to teach original material and designed courses from scratch.

Our first classes were:

1. Foundations of Computing: From NAND to Tetris, an online class TA’ed by Andrew

2. Building LLMs in Practice, TA’ed by Chris

3. Body, Mind, World, an original class created by Tyler and Alicia

4. How to Live Near Your Friends, an original class created by Priya, the author of this post

Eric and Jesse give a guest lecture

We had about 50 students total that first semester.

But then something surprising happened — five of those students wanted to teach a class the next semester. Plus, two people who had guest taught in a class wanted to run their own classes. We also pitched a few other friends who we admired on running their own classes. In our second semester, we ran 18 classes with over 200 students!

How It’s Going…

We just finished our fifth semester of FractalU. We offer over 20-30 courses per semester. We’ve had 62 awesome instructors, who have taught thousands of students.

Most FractalU instructors aren't professional teachers; they have regular day jobs. They teach because they love their subject and want to make friends who share their niche interests. Sometimes they teach in order to gain a better understanding of the subject themselves.

Teaching painting from a tiny New York City living room.

FractalU Doesn’t Exist 👻

So how did we grow from a few humble classes taught by and to our friends to what we have now?

FractalU isn't a business or a nonprofit. In fact, it's not a formal organization at all. It's simply a coordination mechanism with a tiny bit of volunteer admin work done by a team of four.

Three times a year we email instructors and send them a Notion Guide for the upcoming semester. The step-by-step guide helps instructors write a high-quality syllabus and list their class.

The guide also includes a list of spaces where they can host a class. These are living rooms volunteered by our community, in exchange for a small fee. (In addition to local living rooms, we've found two spaces in New York City willing to host: the Google Headquarters and a local dance studio).

After the listing deadline has passed, the admin team advertises the semester. We post to our email list, on social media, and in various local newsletters and lots of group chats.

The instructors handle everything from there. The instructor reviews applications and emails accepted and rejected students.

Most instructors choose to charge a sliding scale rate for their classes. However, since FractalU is not a formal organization, we don't employ anyone. So instructors must deal with collecting money and managing taxes on their own.

We keep admin overhead very low. The admin team only has 3 roles:

1. Emailing instructors a few times a year.

2. Advertising online by poasting good.

3. Curating teachers and classes.

A movement class, on the roof!

Curating teachers and classes

The final task of the admin team is curating teachers and classes. FractalU has grown organically: most of our teachers were first students in another class, and then asked us if they could teach their own class.

We believe the best instructors create high quality social containers. Thus we prefer to choose people we've interacted with a lot both in class and at community events. We want a good sense of their character and social skills before we entrust them to teach.

We also maintain a form where people can apply to teach at FractalU. But it’s rare for us to accept teachers who aren’t already part of the community; it’s hard to vet their competence and social skills from an online form and a Zoom call alone.

Our application process is pretty informal. If someone approaches us to teach, and we have enough data to trust that they’d be a good teacher, we say yes. To keep overhead low, any of the admin team is empowered to independently say yes to a class. If we receive a compelling application from a stranger, we do a video call with them to see if they would be a good fit.

Want To Start a School?

This is the first of a two part series. Click here to read Part 2: The Step-By-Step Guide to Starting a School With Your Friends.

If you want even more hands-on help, we’re running an accelerator this summer to help people start their own campuses, complete with a school, co-living, and regular events. Check it out here.