I’ve suggested this a few times in the past and am reiterating it here in the hope that the team takes action.
The biggest issue with community-created courses is that they enormously vary in quality. This is tied up to another problem - by and large, courses that were created in the early days of the site have the most users and many of these are low-quality. There are numerous examples of language courses with thousands of (ex-)users in which the English equivalent words/phrases are simply Google-translated. Since courses are listed by number of users, new users will inevitably start with these error-strewn courses, which is detrimental to their language learning and reflects badly on Memrise as a whole.
This could be solved by creating a rating system (1-5) or a voting system (the ability to upvote/downvote or simply ‘like’ a course). If there was an option to list courses within a given language by popularity, high-quality courses will eventually rise to the top, incentivising course creators and making it easier for users to find high-effort courses.
I appreciate that resources are limited at Memrise, but as a long-standing paying member and course creator, I find it exasperating that, all these years on, learners still have no way of finding high-quality courses and have to wade through hundreds of abandoned ‘legacy’ courses. So please team, find a solution - it really could revolutionise the site!
We used to have sorting options for searching through the courses. Memrise or user-created, popularity, length of courses and typing options if memory serves me. Reintroduction would be very helpful and valued.
That would be a good start, particularly the ‘length’ option given that a lot of the low-effort courses are very short. The issue is that ‘popularity’ still equals number of uses, which, for the reasons outlined above, is not representative of quality.
Yes, I know but Memrise has never responded to requests for reintroduction of these features anyway. So I really don’t expect them to implement any new features.
The search function is also terrible because it works as an OR-function of the search terms instead of AND.
Absolutely, I was going to include that in the original post, but decided to limit it to the popularity issue. If you search for ‘1000 Russian’ it comes up with all the Russian courses and all the frequency courses on the site, rather than specifically Russian frequency courses - maddening!
You’re right, they probably won’t respond, but every now and then it really riles me and this is the only place to vent!
for audio and NT for no typing courses.