What will the new site cost?

A good question that we thought long and hard about. Although I would love to help provide people with free homework help from quality tutors and experts...it turns out you can't really do that for free . Currently, our homework answer service is actually located at www.mathwarehouse.com/ask where a few teachers and experts have been giving their time to answer questions.

However, it soon became clear that there were not enough experts/teachers who were willing to give substantial amounts of their time to answer all the homework questions(There are almost 2,000 questions right now. It's not a small job)..so I found some very smart people to help out with the questions, and the website has been funding their work for a few months.

This lead to my thinking about the best way to connect experts who can answer math questions with students who are willing to pay for help with their homework. We came up with the following system:

-Anyone can ask any question for free!

-However, when you ask a question, you state how much you would be willing to pay to buy the help that you need.

-Any expert can answer the question. If you want to answer a question, you write a preview of your answer (and the full answer), only the preview will be sent to the question asker.

After you get your answer, you can give the tutor a rating and write a comment-this will help the future students who might want to work with that tutor.

New Site is Coming Along

I am really excited about the progress we are making with the new site. Right now, our homework question and answer service uses http://www.question2answer.org/ software--an open source easy to install application. It's a great product for what it does --which is provide a stackexchange like question and answer board.

However, after using question2answer for some time, there were too many ways in which it did not meet our needs including: 1) not providing any kind of compensation for the experts who tend to answer all of the questions 2) offering a rather inflexible user profile accounts that lacked features we wanted like user ratings, comments 3) not providing the sort of hierarchical organization that subjects tend to have (ie calculus is a subcategory of Math while Java is a subcategory of Programming). To be completely clear, I think that question2answer is great, but it is just not a marketplace.

But if we are going to create a marketplace for math homework help, it became clear that a different platform was needed, and we are getting there. The new site looks awesome (see the screenshots at the bottom). It is a veritable homework marketplace where you can post math homework questions, state how much money you would pay to get help. After that tutors/experts can reply by sending you a preview of their answer. If you like their preview, you can buy the answer to your question. Here are some screenshots: