Questions about Official Courses?

[WildSage]

Who makes the Official Courses? Are they staff or volunteer made? Are these made by people with language teaching skills or simply a high fluency in both languages?

[ApolloNexus]

I think the official courses are made by memrise, like all the language ones are called something like (language) 1, but i’m not sure

[alanh]

There’s an explanation here: http://feedback.memrise.com/knowledgebase/articles/919596-official-memrise-created-courses-difficulty-level

…and a bit more background here: http://feedback.memrise.com/knowledgebase/articles/955108-a1-and-a2-language-courses

Maybe best to tag the individual Memrise language specialists to ask about the content of specific courses.

[WildSage]

That’s exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.

[Baomir]

@ alanh: The links you have sent do not work anymore. Is there any other way to read the explanation? Thank you.

[rlkirby]

@weibao
I don’t think the mention worked. I think it’s because of the space.

@alanh

@weibao

The links you have sent do not work anymore. Is there any other way to read the explanation? Thank you.

[alanh]

Thanks @rlkirby. I don’t remember seeing the post by @weibao before. As you spotted, the tag wasn’t quite right. This may no longer be a live issue.

Those old ‘Knowledge Base’ articles were lost when they re-vamped the “FAQs” section. There are still one or two forum topics containing discussion about the difficulty levels of the ‘official’ courses when they were changed from “A1, A2, B1, etc” to “1, 2, 3 etc”. Here is a link to one:

A1/A2 French, German and Spanish courses converted to A1=1,2,3 / A2=4,5,6,7

These courses seem to have disappeared from the course search, although I can still study the German courses I am signed up to from my dashboard. Is this a bug or are they being discontinued? That would be such a shame as they are great courses.

[rlkirby]

Thanks @alanh.
But who are the “individual Memrise language specialists” who you suggested tagging in your previous post? And are they staff or volunteers?

[frabcus_memrise (Francis (Memrise))]

All the courses made by user Memrise on Memrise are official courses, and are made by Memrise staff. Some of the staff are full-time in house, and some are external freelancers.

The best way to ask them a question is in the appropriate language sub-category of the “Official Memrise Courses” forum area http://community.memrise.com/c/official-memrise-courses

Hope that helps!

[alanh]

But who are the “individual Memrise language specialists” who you suggested tagging in your previous post? And are they staff or volunteers?

As Francis suggests, the best way is to go to the relevant course forum (the forum title will identify the course as “by Memrise”) and the first post in the forum will often identify the username of the Memrise language specialist).

It is also possible to identify staff members who act as language specialists by going to the “Trust Level” of the “Badges” area of the forum (specifically the Leader and Regular badges). Clicking/tapping on the names will show the person’s forum profile, which says if they are a language specialist employed by Memrise. There were not so many of these badge holders at the time of the original post, though!