[Several years ago, in their leap to mobile and memrise-sponsored language courses, Memrise made a series of changes that completely broke many, perhaps even most, of the community courses. Many course creators spent hundreds of hours of their own time building and supporting those courses. In the hopes that Memrise might decide to care about about a platform for community courses again, I’m going to post some feedback here about the biggest categories of breakage they could fix. This post is part of that series. If Memrise takes these posts seriously, and responds seriously, that could be an indication that they care about this again.]
Background:
Memrise the original community platform had a feature called “multimedia levels”, which were really just text levels, but with the ability to also embed YouTube videos. Some courses were built with this feature in mind and very much depend on it. For example, my Hebrew course includes explanations like this that course takers are expected to see before the move to subsequent levels:
Another way I use multimedia levels is with level pairs like this:
You watch the video on level 9, and then learn the words and phrases she used on level 10. Level 10 makes no sense at all without having watched level 9’s video.
When Memrise created a mobile app, they just completely omitted these levels. If you view my Hebrew course on the app, you can’t see those levels at all. You can see how this can ruin a course that was designed with multimedia levels as an integral part of the course.
What Memrise should do:
Ideally, memrise would add multimedia levels to the mobile apps. But it’s highly unlikely they would ever care enough to do that, since they don’t use these in their own courses. A feature used only by community created courses never seems worth that much work on their part. But they could at least un-break these courses, and stop giving mobile users a dramatically broken experience, by taking a shortcut:
In the mobile app, at least show that those levels are there in the list - give their titles. When someone gets to one of those levels, give them a web link to that same level on memrise.com, so they can view it in their browser.
“Repair the community posts” series:
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
- which could (I think) be easy to implement.