You donāt have to do courses from Joe Scmoo. It is your choise.
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Thatās the point. Without rating courses we do not always know who is qualified and who is just making garbage courses.
I suspect the people making courses are the ones who fear the rating idea. Maybe if they spent that energy improving the quality of their courses they would have nothing to fear.
Here I disagree with you. Have you made any courses?
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What part are you disagreeing with?
So I guess you have notā¦
Letās make a deal. You go and create a great quality course and then we evaluate you and then you can complain as much as you want if you want
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Memrise is not complete without the ability to rate and review courses. You could say the product is broken at the moment. We need to be able to sort on course quality and popularity. This is such a simple and obvious idea that it does not need any further argumentation.
Memrise staff reading this should think to themselves: how can I make this happen within the next 6 months? Perhaps use an external module?
Here are some ideas from an earlier thread:
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I didnāt respond to that because it is irrelevant.
You are clearly just taking this personally so maybe you need to step back and consider this about making a better product for everybody and not just a platform for you to showcase your amazing and infallible talent talent as a course creator.
Memrise staff should also remind themselves that they are selling a product. A product that only some people are paying for while they subsidize the free version for the other users. Quality matters.
As Iāve mentioned previously, I have heard from many people that they donāt use Memrise any more because of quality issues. They lost a lot of serious learners that they would have been able to turn into paying customers if it hadnāt been for this issue. And some who were paying for it.
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I want more sorting methods for course display when new users search. Courses are currently sorted by number of learners. This has an āage biasā on courses (old courses have more learners) and doesnāt put the best courses at the top, plus audio courses should automatically be at the top. The only way to currently find audio courses is to open the course and try it.
Proposed sort types:
āRecommendedā - Senior members of that language community pick the best courses. Good definitions and high quality audio.
āAudioā - only courses with 80%+ audio are shown.
āLearnersā - Number of learners ie the current technique.
āMost wordsā - Biggest courses to smallest
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There was a nice long discussion of this on the old forum, back when memrise first got rid of the ability to sort courses by popularity or ānewestā. Fortunately archive.org still has a copy of at least one of those threads where we discussed this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150908091116/http://www.memrise.com/thread/1345621
I think there were other discussions of this but I donāt know if they got saved. However, I do remember that memginee collected peopleās suggestions and posted that as a suggestion on the uservoice forum, which was memriseās official forum for feature suggestions. It got lots and lots of votes and was one of the top suggestions for a long time.
Unfortunately, as with pretty much all suggestions from users since summer 2014, memrise ignored it completely as far as we know.
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The better visibility of course forums and search filters & indicators is also discussed in this thread:
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@Kaspian: Also the level. That is important too. Beginner, intermediate, advanced, from beginner to advanced, whatever. But some way to indicate what kind of course that is.
And to reply to @WildSageās opinions too: Iām not totally convinced that you have to be a native speaker to make a good course. You have to be a dedicated learner, preferably on a high enough level, just as you need to be if you are a language teacher. Often someone who has also learnt it as a second language has more insight about what is difficult, what is confusing, what is hard to grasp. And of course as you progress, should you find mistakes in your own course, you fix them.
Have your learnt something which is actually wrong, I think you will find it out soon enough anyway, when you try to use it ā and then you will remember for ever, because of the silly mistake you made on it 
And for course creators being afraid of ratings ā quite the contrary. Course creators are learners too, and mostly they are dedicated to bringing high quality content to the community. They also want to be able to find the best courses without trying for hours with hits and misses all over the place. I for one am creating a course mostly for myself: I am building the one I would have wanted to use if it existed, and Iām pretty sure that lots of others are in the same boat.
And yes, I have used lots of user created courses and also official ones, and I have quit lots as well. Sometimes the logic doesnāt fit me, sometimes it has just too many mistakes, sometimes it is just not 100% accurate (like Memriseās own Swedish which has some messy solutions, and using den/det as interchangeable, and mixing adverbs with adjectives sometimes.) But I wouldnāt say that the overall quality is so incredibly bad here: you just have to give it time and you need little patience to find the courses with suit you best. But someone, who really wants to learn a language, doesnāt shy away from little research, I think.
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I believe the word I used was fluent not native.
As to everything else I stand by my belief that ratings are important. This isnāt about 100% accuracy. Itās about creating good quality courses. If someone was dedicated to creating those they would welcome ratings and review. Not fight them.
Yes, most of us do that. And what some of us are finding is that Memrise has no quality control. Again they are selling a product. They need to give reasons to buy that product. āWe let anyone make a course and donāt care if they are any goodā isnāt a particularly appealing sales pitch.
Iām not sure why so many people here donāt value their time enough to choose quality over quantity. Quite frankly I think it is sad.
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From my point of view - as a learner and a course creator -, I donāt think that number of learners and rating courses are the best ways to evaluate a course, because number of learners taking specialized and advanced courses is less than learners taking easy courses for sure.
For the time being, I only created advanced arabic courses:
- one course is about arabic proverbs
- another one is about advanced vocabulary taken from a book written in the 11th century.
- another one is a classical poetry course (poetry from the 6th century)
These courses are considered intermediate to advanced even for arabic speakers. So, it is normal to see few people taking these courses. It does not mean that the material is bad, or that the courses are not well done. And I am pretty sure, that one day if these courses are not lost, people who are interested in learning arabic - even if arabic is not their mother tongue - will appreciate them.
Besides, I think that the same thing applies to specialized courses: If I decide to create - someday- courses in medicine for example, I am sure that only few people will take these courses.
Moreover, I donāt think that a learner can rely only on an application to learn a language, but it is very helpful and boosting for sure. Using an application has its advantages and drawbacks, so we can not expect perfectness.
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@mila83 - Youāre proving my point for me!
Searching for Memrise courses currently results in a list that is sorted (or mostly sorted) by popularity. This means that courses like yours with only a few learners, are likely to be low on the list, no matter how good they are. If we had a good rating system and Memrise improved the search function, the learners in your courses could mark them as high-quality. Then people looking for high-quality, advanced Arabic courses would see yours at or near the top of the list.
A good rating system and search function would rank a course based on the number of 5 star ratings relative to the total number of learners. That way, a course with ten 5-star ratings and only 20 learners would rank higher than a course with ten 5-star ratings and 500 learners or one with one hundred 5-star ratings and 10,000 learners.
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I have noticed as well, Memrise just redid their Japanese courses, and I couldnāt find them on the app when I searched, yet they appeared easily on the website.
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In the app (at least iOS) you need to be sure to select the right language as the one you are speaking, e.g. English (UK) rather that English (US).
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Good suggestion, that mightāve been it. Either way though, it should still show up
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