I don’t care that 327k people happened to have joined a course. That’s easy to do (even accidentally) with a single mouse click and tells me nothing about how effective the course happens to be for the average user. I also don’t care about whatever silly algorithm Memrise uses to predict how long a course will take. What I care about is how many people have completed that course and how long on average it to for them to complete it.
Also if in the future, Memrise gives all users the ability auto-learn courses (and not just the course creator), change it so that Memrise shows how many people have put all their words into 20 days or more spacing and how much time went into doing that on average.
This can also help create a sort of game score. There can be a “Course Time” score where completed course offers point total in form of average time it took all users to complete. There’s also a “Course Popularity” score where you get points for completing a course equal to the number of people that completed it. Lot harder to “cheat” those scores and they offer much more context.
In addition, just showing in user profiles the “percentage complete” for courses they’re subscribed can be a good way to gauge how they’re approaching Memrise.
the feature used to exist in the old memrise, but ate a tremendous amount of resources - if it was so consuming 4 years ago, imagine the situation now, with the current number of users. (In my opinion, it should be available only for teachers/ schools paying for database capacity and devs work)
How hard is it to keep a tracker that a person completed a course? That’s literally if 100% then true. Not even 8 bits of registry. It’s literally the same amount of resources as tracking/displaying if a person joined a course.
Now, giving publicly data about how much a person completed would be consuming, but I’m not asking for that. Basically my idea is just adding a new variable where if an entry reaches 20 days spacing (even if later missed), then it ticks “entry is in long term memory” to true.
More detailed stats that track real time date, sure, limit that to people paying for the server load. However, such information is not of concern to the average user that wants to see if hundreds if not thousands of people actually finished a course. That might mean that course is not just popular, but also functional.
It would be much more resource intensive than just tracking the fact that a user joined a course, because joining a course is a static and binary fact that is only computed and stored once.
But tracking whether a user has finished a course is a moving target, which has to be computed after every learning session, and also has to be recomputed every time items are added or removed from the course by the course creator, or its contributors.
The computation is also complicated by the fact that users can ignore items in a course, for various reasons. For example, if a course has 100 items, but I have ignored 10 of them, and learned 90, have I finished the course? And what if I change my mind and unignore some of those items? The computation of whether I am finished needs to be redone again.
So, I think it would be a highly resource intensive report, and if made available at all, could probably only be offered as an on-demand report to course creators, rather than as a constant real-time display on the course’s home page.
Memrise has a very limited staff and budget, and it’s amazing that they are able to do all that they do with the resources they have. I wouldn’t expect them to be adding any major features for the time being.