@Zyme, you’re right. But as far as we can tell, Memrise doesn’t care.
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there are no courses fora whatever. There is nothing on the main page of a memrise user that could let her/him even guess the presence of a course forum
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Exactly! I can’t find any course forums either and am desperate to get back in touch with cherub, the creator of Duolingo Russian, for clearing up some ambivalences in the review cues. This interaction betwen course creator and course users is absolutely vital for the quality of courses. Please make it easy for us to interact again!
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I totally agree with Zyme and V75 that most of us aren’t here for a big festival. We want to work on courses and would like to be able to make comments or suggest corrections to specific courses, that would have had a much better chance of being read and answered. I probably will not be in this new forum unless I see no other option. Any idea how to do private messages?
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Please bring course forums back. Without them my courses would be of much lower quality and would contain a lot of errors.
They were a great way to improve course content via feedback from users who had difficulty understanding, had good suggestions for improvement, or noticed errors I overlooked.
We should protest by bumping this thread at least once a day.
As @alanh already mentioned there is a thread discussing how the new system can be used for course forums. Basically, anyone can create a topic for a course in the corresponding Language Quarters category and start discussing the course. The topic name should look like:
[Course Forum] My wonderful course by skstudio
You should also add the course-forum tag to the topic. The course creator can then add the link to the topic to his course description (ideally it should be possible to assign the link to the Forum button). That’s it.
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@skstudio - so course creaters should create a topic for a course in the corresponding Language Quarters category and start discussing the course. And then what? After several years of posts, how long should the learners of a course scroll down to find what they are looking for? And also, what about a person who has created over a hundred courses on Memrise? Should they create a topic for each individual course? You are probably going to say yes. To me, it just seems like you are creating a whole lot of work for course creaters to be able to keep in touch with course takers, and it’s something that very few course takers will understand. Plain and simple … the individual course forums WORKED! This DOESN’T!
And I am not saying, @skstudio, that you work for Memrise, but by your previous posts and how you are not outraged by what is going on … you just might.
@jaimebrasil I will just pretend that I did not notice all that accusations and will try to be constructive.
I have never said that the current systems is perfect. For example, it could be better integrated in Memrise, such that a new topic is automatically created when a new course is created. The old “Froum” button could be automatically linked to this new topic. Even better solution would be to create a new category for each course, which would allow for convenient grouping of multiple topics for the same course. I believe all that can be done with time. Until then we can think about and discuss how we can work with what we have.
I do not know the reasons of Memrise for switching to the Discourse platform, but I can imagine that the old forums were just too limited and making the more feature rich and connected would require a lot of work, which would be redundant, because there are a lot of available forum applications out there. Furthermore, I think they wanted to provide a place where the whole Memrise community (which was partitioned among old course forums) could communicate and cooperate easily.
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The previous forums worked extremely well. I am a course creator or a course ℅-ordinator on a number of Dutch courses and have several years experience of working to improve these courses
The old system simple to use. It was easy to post. It was easy to scroll through previous contributions. The system automatically set up the forums. There was no work involved)
(Lots of people, including me, do not want to do anything more than learn.)
This new system provides no additional benefits whatsoever (that I can see)
And a whole lot of interesting material has been lost. Including threads showing how several courses have been improved. It’s a retrogressive step. I can only imagine there are some hidden cost savings for Memrise - otherwise why do something so major without testing the new system out???
Not good.
So, I too will just pretend and try to be constructive.
I just want to take your last sentence … Furthermore, I think they wanted to provide a place where the whole Memrise community (which was partitioned among old course forums) could communicate and cooperate easily. So, people studying my “Brazilian Portuguese” courses need not be partitioned? They need to be on a general forum platform with students of courses other than Brazilian Portuguese. I can definitely see that. The students of my Brazilian Portuguese courses would definitely be better off if they could communicate with students taking other language courses. That would definitely help them with their questions about the particular language that they are studying. That makes a whole lot of sense. Forget about the individual course. Forget about being able to talk about the individual course that you are taking. It’s more important to be dumped into the entire Memrise community to ask about an item in an individual course?
Why do you want to discuss my guesses about reasons for Memrise switching, instead of discussing all the possible improvements and solutions that I proposed? What can you say about the first paragraph in my previous post?
Okay … the first thing that stood out was this - Even better solution would be to create a new category for each course, which would allow for convenient grouping of multiple topics for the same course. (your words, not mine).
I don’t really understand what you are saying there, but in the past each individual course forum allowed for course takers to do just what it is that “I think” that you are trying to say without having to spend several hours searching the main forum.
@jaimebrasil ~ I thought I would interject here and state that all you really need to do to ease your concerns about users on any of your courses is simply create one course forum page, and add a link on it to the teaching page on your Memrise profile. Then put a link on each of your courses directing users to the forum page you set up. It only takes a few minutes.
ALL communication from users on ANY of your courses will go where YOU direct it to, not to some generic, general forum. So the choice is really up to you on how you want to resolve this issue.
If you need to know how to do this, here is what I did on my forum page [Course Forum] For all courses created by @pdao (I have just one page for all 20 of my courses). An example of the url to put on your courses could look like what I did on each of mine (put it in the description of the course) http://www.memrise.com/course/346419/2015-tocfl-vocabulary-level-i/
Again, you are in control of how to resolve the issue.
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One could also create several topics for each course (e.g., Discussion, Bugs, Suggestions, …) and link them on that general course page. That general page would be as a hub (a start page). When a student comes to that start page he sees which courses and which topics are available.
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As @xvg11 has pointed out:
It appears that the “Forum” button on each course has now been removed;
Details and follow on discussion here
For those of you who have not seen this discussion, (to which I have contributed), may I draw it to your attention as it is related and very relevant.
We really have a problem now in not being able to contact Creators or Contributors who haven’t appeared on this Forum yet.
It would be really helpful if either PMs worked, even if they haven’t found this area yet, or if we could invite them, somehow.
This is such a frustrating change! The course forums were very helpful. Between this and the removal of auto-ignore, it seems like Memrise just keeps removing features.
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Can someone tell me where to direct feedback for [SAT Comprehensive] course? I’ve searched the forums using the search function and nothing came up.
It’s really a headache…