Where have the course forums gone?? I have created courses and help administer others. Where are corrections posted, and how can I check whether posts have been made that I may have missed???
The change is explained here: [Site Feedback] Changes to Course Forums - email from Olivia Zavala
You will need to trawl through the relevant subjects in either:
http://community.memrise.com/c/language-quarters
or:
http://community.memrise.com/c/community-hub
or:
You could try the new forum search tool in the top right corner (it’s quite good):
Good luck!
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Dear V75, I also dearly miss the old course forums. I hope that you guys continue your great work and that we can work for the time with the work around posted by alanh (which does not seem to have the ease and intuitiveness of the old solutions where one had a dedicated forum for each course which also was directly linked from the course page).
Best!
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Personally, this seems a step backwards. I completely agree with you about the old course based forums. I felt real commitment to them. And as I had missed the notification of the changes, I haven’t kept anything. Not happy.
But yes, we will still keep working on!
I haven’t talked to Pyrrhon yet, but I’m sure we’ll try to keep the spirit of the old course based forum.
I’m sailing in Holland at the moment, so I’ll try and work something out with him when I’m in a harbour with reliable wifi.
I’ll keep you posted!
Best,
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Thanks! I’ll try and get my head to this…
I can see some advantage of having some general language based forums, but much my work on courses where I’m involved is just the hard slog of tidying up courses.
I really can’t see why that format needed changing. But there we go…I love Memrise, but there seems to much change for changes sake…
Best
I too miss the old course forums. Memrise said they were having massive SPAM attacks on the forums, and this site provides more protection.
I personally wonder whether there was a licensing fee for the old system.
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Could be! After all, that’s what spelled the end of the picture facility in making mems. A hugely retrogressive step. This seems another one. Sad.
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This new forum is really a total mess and really prevents me from giving any feedback to courses at all.
I am here to learn the courses I joined and not for being forced to join a community. With the old ‘Forum’ it was always easy to get in contact with the direct course creator and to write short messages about typos or questions, just by clicking ‘forum’ and open a new topic or replying to an already opened one. It was 2 clicks without any difficulties.
But now this option has just been removed without any replacement. So this update was really a big step backwards. I don’t want to spend hours searching a whole mess of threads from dozen of other courses i am not interested in, or post my questions/remarks in just one single course thread and then spend hours looking for the answer that is regarding my question.
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Not to mention that so many interesting discussion and answers of dedicated users have just been deleted, giving them no chance to reread their old thoughts and explanations again.
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Yes, I agree. Some people enjoy the community interaction. But the vast majority of us just want to get on with the courses we are learning. The old system was simple to access. (spam?? On one of the courses, we had a troll briefly. It was easy to get rid of him)
A step backwards indeed.
Unfortunately, we are stuck with it. I cannot be.ieve there is any chance at all of reversing it. Memrise just doesn’t listen to its users when they’ve made a big decision like this.
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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?