Custom courses

Hi all

Does memrise still allow for custom courses? I can only see official memrise french courses and not any custom ones.

If it does still support them, how can I add them and create them (for my own use)?

Olly

Hi @Oliver_Marshall69,

Yes, users can still create their own courses at https://app.memrise.com/course/create/ :grinning:

Courses created by other Memrise learners can’t be browsed via the “Search” function within the mobile apps, however you can still access them on our website at https://app.memrise.com/courses/.

You can always continue learning community-created courses in the Memrise mobile app. Simply start learning a course on web, and it will be available in the app as well.

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Thanks.

Will custom courses be coming back to mobile? Many of us are mobile-only.

Olly

Partly this answer depends on what you mean by “support”.

The Memrise web site still allows you to create courses, and to take courses created by other users. However, several years ago Memrise decided they don’t care about these, and want to be a mobile language-learning app with language courses they create. At that point, they completely stopped “supporting” the user-create courses - and worse, they aggressively started to break and degrade them.

They’ve wavered a bit about this in the past two years or so. At some point, they seemed to be saying the would pay attention to community courses again. They made plans to put them on a separate site called “Decks”. They did that, but then they pretty much entirely neglected the Decks site. Then they decided it wasn’t working (obviously not, since they totally neglected it) and got rid of Decks and left all the user-created courses on the main memrise site. Many of them still broken by changes they made a few years earlier.

And, as you’ve noticed, quite hidden on mobile. This is because for a long time they were available on mobile but badly broken and inconsistent between web and mobile, because memrise developed their mobile app just for their own language learning system that was new and different from the web, and they never bothered to even try to make community courses work well in the mobile apps. So after a few years of neglect, they seem to have given up.

Last spring, when they were once again saying some things that sounded like they might want to care about community courses again, I posted a series summarizing how they broke those courses a few years earlier and suggesting how they might repair the damage:

1 - Repair the community courses, 1: "multimedia" levels
2 - Repair the community courses, 2: commas and parentheses
3 - Repair the community courses, 3: Show one photo, not all
4 - Repair the community courses, 4: Course forums

As you can see, nearly a year has passed and nobody from memrise has even bothered to acknowledge the existence of those posts, let along say whether they’d do any of the things suggested there, ever in the future (though it would be totally within Memrise’s character to jump in to say “sorry we can’t get to this this month, we have other priorities right now” and not bother to say what they think of the suggestions or whether they’ll ever do any of them in the future; Memrise loves to give frustrating brick-wall non-answers like that when it comes to user-created courses).

You could still make your own course. Just be prepared to spend many hours creating a course only to have memrise change something next year that messes up your course, and makes you have to put in a lot more hours to fix it, without them caring at all. Be prepared to have very inconsistent experiences between web and mobile. Be prepared to have bugs you find, ignored. Be prepared to be made to feel like Memrise really hates you, while they don’t even notice because in reality, they don’t care enough to hate you, they just don’t care.

They had a great platform going for a long time, but… trying to get into making courses on Memrise now is a recipe for heartache and frustration and bitterness, and I recommend against it.

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