Bring back the course forums

Community-Created Courses Learning Central
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Memrise team, have you asked course contributors what they think of the new style of forum?

I’ve stopped contributing since the individual course forums were removed.

When will you realise that your system is a mess with this new approach to the forums? You are alienating the community and have made it harder for them to contribute.

Before, when contributing to a course, if someone had something to say about the course they could do it in the course forum, quickly and easily. Contributors would automatically receive e-mails. Now contributors have to set up their own topics for each course? What about courses with multiple contributors, how do all contributors receive updates easily?

If your system requires extra effort from course contributors/administrators then it is not a good system. Please reconsider your forums for the benefit of everyone and the long term survival prospects of memrise.

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While it confused me at first when I saw the course forums disappear, I don’t mind the new format. It is a bit more versatile, but I do miss having multiple topics for the course, not just everything for a course in one big thread. I do think course creators need to have an option to adding a course forum link button to their course so that it’s a bit more like it used to be.

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@moonglum101 It is a shame they have gone and we have tried our best to find a work-around and are still supporting courses this new way.

You (or others viewing this thread) might like to visit both these two threads if you haven’t seen them already.

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Below the reply button at the bottom of topics is a button “Normal,” click that and change it to “Watching.”

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Good point and it works well if the creator has set up a [Course Forum] for a single course or suite of his/ her courses.

But if there is a [CF] for several courses supported by a contributor (like my Italian one) but the creator hasn’t set up one, then it could involve other contributors either joining a thread and not supporting the actual course being talked about or setting up their own thread and then the questions about a course could be spread over two or more threads.

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I think all course creators pretty much universally agree that it’s bad that memrise removed the course forums without giving a decent replacement - something where every course has its own forum, linked obviously and automatically from that course, where people can post multiple posts. However, memrise has completely ignored our feedback about this and I don’t think they’ll ever care. In their view, the course forums were a “web” feature, and only mobile matters, web is just something they used to do that they’re allowing to remain, begrudgingly. Since they never bothered to give mobile users any way to contact course creators aside from going to the web, they decided that means mobile users don’t need a way to communicate with course creators, and that course maintainers don’t need a way to communicate with mobile users either. Mobile is a forum-free world on memrise, and in the minds of memrise, mobile users never visit the web and the web doesn’t matter and course forums were too big a drain on their servers or their development time so they got rid of them.

By even being here and caring, you show yourself to be exactly the kind of dedicated and passionate user of memrise that memrise explicitly doesn’t want to hear from or care about. So we’re stuck with working around these problems together, on our own, without their help, to make the most of this platform - because despite the damage they’ve inflicted on it in the past two years, it’s still surprisingly good and effective and we’ll keep using it as long as we can.

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Thank you for your responses.

I’m sad about things because of all the effort I put it in the past which now feels wasted. I no longer think that memrise is good and effective, which is really such a shame. Somewhere along the line a good idea has been destroyed because of the desire to monetise it.

I wonder what we have happened if the team had actually had some avid memrise users involved in their product roadmap meetings.

Thanks for the links DW7. I had seen the first thread. As for the Course Creator’s Wish List, I really hope your effort of grouping these things together does not turn out to be a futile one. I didn’t see anything there for a course creator to be able to view and search existing mems so that they can be reused.

I’m off back to my corner to despair at the demise of memrise.

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Perhaps you could add that useful idea to the numbered list, please.

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Memrise, in all sorts of ways, has had quite an effect on my life.

It’s a great concept, and there’s a lot you can do with it (website - I’ve never used the app.).

I am very fond/?protective of it (with a large hint of exasperation!), but there is so much potential that isn’t exploited and, as a creator of quality courses in a ‘niche’ language, I would really like more promotion of good courses and interaction with other learners.

A lot of people didn’t find the old course forums, so stumbling over here is even less likely.

:sunflower:

Would be a great idea - maybe they already do? Although my imaginations of what goes on at Memrise meetings isn’t always flattering …

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Hi @leggi

as a creator of quality courses in a ‘niche’ language,

I was interested to look at your courses but using the obvious link

http://www.memrise.com/user/leggi/courses/teaching/

is bringing up a 404 error message.

PS It now works.

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opa! In an attempt to get the attention of the handful of Memrise users that might be interested, I changed my user name a couple of days ago: http://www.memrise.com/user/leggi._new_course_out.../courses/teaching/

There’s nothing ‘wow’ about my courses, but they are mistake free and well designed IMO, :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: Individually created entries, teaching basic grammar as well as a lot of vocabulary, with synonyms/confusables added as ‘have another go’ alternatives, and attributes to indicate exactly what is being asked for. I’ve used the courses for at least a couple of years, so they are well tested for long term use too.

I don’t have audio (only one BG course does as far as I’m aware - which should be the one displayed in the top box) but I do have pronunciations, showing vowel stress and when voiced consonants become voiceless, that flash up after a test. (at least on the courses where I’ve sat and copied the pronunciations originally added as plain attributes before I knew about the feature. )

(It’s a shame multi-media levels aren’t shown on the app. I think mine give some good explanations of the basic grammar of Bulgarian.)

I’m currently converting some of my 'type the Bulgaria’n courses into ‘read the Bulgarian’. I’m slowly working on another course to help with sentence structure and phrases, and one using pronouns (32 long forms, ?7 short forms off the top of my head) and prepositions - but they will be a while!

:sunflower:

I do wonder how many people/potential customers! try a couple of courses on Memrise, get put off by the quality and give up. With no clues for new users about how to find good courses, they try a couple near the top and that’s it. Only the dedicated, or those in the know, are going to load pages of courses looking for the gems.

I’m frustrated that I’ll publish courses now and they’ll languish at the end of a very long list. And Bulgarian’s not even a popular subject - decent courses must be all over the place but how’s one to know? Although Memrise’s focus appears to have shifted to the app. and to official courses, there is still a lot of excellent user created courses that they should make easy to find IMO for an increase in user retention.

bigger user base = more potential pro customers.

And back on point - I doubt the course forums will return, but I do hope a course’s home page is redesigned to include the ability to link to a forum here - something obvious!

It would be good to be able to invite Memrise users to the forum too.

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Thanks @leggi

Interestingly your name here hasn’t changed automatically or forced you to log in again with your new name.

Also I am still following you (automatically) and all your “leggi” courses have your new creator name. (I thought I recognised your name and was expecting your ‘goat’ photo.)

Finally, many of the points you mention above we agree with and have been listed elsewhere eg how do users find a good course (and by one of us rather than the MemRise team) as the number of ‘users’ is no proof of quality - hence the request for a “star” appreciation of great courses.

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@DW7 have you a link to the star appreciation request thread? A simple marker on tested and recommended courses could make quite a difference from sorting the wheat from the chaff - depending on the criteria for being able to award a ‘‘star’’. Imagine - courses listed by most recent, most recommended, size and popularity! :smiling_imp:

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I’ve done extensive keyword searching and only found this but there was another :

It may be this post and subsequently, I think:

There was reference to “star”, “quality” and “similar to google play” but I can’t find it now.

Also see item 6 in the same thread:

A rating of the different elements, and of the total course from 0 to 5 stars

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5 posts were merged into an existing topic: [Course Forum] Sungkyunkwan University words level 3 and 4 by SandhyaKordelaar

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@DW7 cheers for the links. I like the idea of a simple mark/star on courses users have recommended (after someone’s completed enough of it to judge!), I’ll check those threads when I’ve got time. :sunflower:

As for the course forums - they were something that a learner could use to assess the quality of a course (multiple error reports and no response = not good!). Now that the forums have gone it seems even more important to improve a users experience by making it easy to find good courses.

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@leggi, you can add this one to your list of ‘bedtime reading’ [Site Feedback] Better visibility for new courses, issues with the app, accountability for absentee course creators -- with possible solutions to each.

As you know, the topic of grading the quality of courses has rumbled on for a long time and we are no nearer getting a solution - of any kind, let alone one that the majority of users would be happy with. I think that’s a major failing. But, while Memrise continue to concentrate on developing and pushing their own courses, I don’t suppose there will be much appetite within ‘Memrise Towers’ for spending any time on this.

Anyway, this isn’t the right forum topic to be renewing this debate. Maybe, when I have some time on my hands, I’ll kick it off again in a thread of its own. :pensive:

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I’ve been doing an Italian course and the course creator has not created a forum for the course so I don’t know how to contact him. There are a few mistakes in the course and also many synonyms that are not resolved. I don’t know if he is still maintaining the course and don’t know how to contact him. I’d love to be added as a contributor if he is no longer interested. Do any have any suggestions about this?

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@wynrich, call @Lien for help. She’ll answer

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There are a lot of Italian courses. You should specify and provide a link to the specific Italian course you are referring to, so that Lien can contact them for you.