From an interview conducted a few months ago with Memrise co-founder Ed Cooke:
What was your biggest business mistake?
Not going purely mobile in 2010. We considered it at length but, because our only developer knew web and not mobile development and we already had a web prototype, we thought it would be safest to stick to the web.
…
How will your market look in three years?
I think learning will be considered more a form of entertainment than, say, professional or scholarly development.
So I think it is safe to say that to Memrise, the web site is an unfortunate accident, that they would rather not have to be bothered with. They really just want a gamified app, and not a web site suited for “professional or scholarly development.”
That statement “I think learning will be considered more a form of entertainment than, say, professional or scholarly development” is quite a loaded statement. I’m unsure if his ideal is that more people learn for fun, or whether it is an admission that most of the things people learn off of Memrise have no future payoff. Especially for the app user who may be more casual and learn less on average than a web user.
Granted, I can sort of see where he is coming from. In the age of deep learning, neural networks, and weak-AI, learning languages will become a time investment not worth it to most language learners when you can just put in your ear buds and have instant translation which is ~90% correct. Unless one is aiming for true mastery of a language, which cannot be attained through flashcards, the idea that you may learn a language before going on a vacation to get to a “survival level” may fade away.
that world of instant translation ear-buds/brain chips does not really need humans… unless you find a way to keep alive earth’s population beyond the (wage work) gainful employment /Erwerbstätigkeit model of these days - 1 or you have the rich up in the athmosphere and we the rest fighting for water and food down here, 2 or the matrix was a cosy cute story altogether
You don’t want to be tied to your computer to learn something, and you can’t go sit behind your computer to do some reviewing while you’re waiting for the bus, so focusing on the app is good. And have the learning be fun instead of boring “scholarly development” also makes sense, even if the end-product still is scholarly development.
There’s nothing wrong with what he’s saying here. If you don’t provide a website however, you also can’t provide a way to create courses or mems to users. That is worrying for anyone who likes to create or do user-created courses. We’re slowly being boiled here, at the mercy of people who disregard existing users and won’t communicate to let them prepare. Or, this can’t be called an interview. It’s a fluff piece with no in-depth info.
I think this is key. Based on what he explicitly said, they never actually wanted to provide a web site, or even give us a way to make community courses. If they had been able to go purely mobile as they wished, then the community courses and the whole “community learning” concept would have been impossible from the start. I think they just gave lip service to the whole “community thing” and saw it as a means to an end, which they would have to put up with, until they achieved critical mass to go purely mobile at some point in the near future. I still think that is their plan.
In addition I think it’s very revealing that he said “I hadn’t actually had a job of any kind before starting Memrise, or at least not one in a company.” So that may, in part, explain why their customer relations are so unprofessionally handled. He never received any hands-on training in how a successful company treats its customers.
i remember the article on the bbc website about memory and learning which mentioned him and which finally brought me here
it begins to feel as a mistake
Well, the other CEO is Ben Whately and he seems to be a bit different, because he has actually created courses on memrise. So he must have been quite in favour of the website side of things.
It seems difficult to imagine Mr Whately wilfully abandoning the people who signed up for his courses.
well, although the elder, and the foreign languages speaker among the two (I think Ed speaks only Oxbridge received pronounciation, but of course I might be wrong) Ben spent time with fundraising and sustained the fremium idea. Ben bothered as well with user complaints etcetc. I am probably absolutely biased and know things only from hearing, for sure…
never saw the other one, never in here, but for interviews and some youtube clip: the master of memory (or trainer, or something) forgetting to renew the domain and contritely handing over the CEO chair to Mousha, the former mascot of Memrise (the cat is now on a farm, as Olivia told me some one two? years ago - I really did ask what happened with the cat ) . I suspect the whole move of bringing in Daniel Zohar 4 years ago was to finaly get solely a mobile platform, as Ed Cooke wanted.
I think he’s deluded if he believes Memrise would have been as successful as a mobile app only. I certainly would never even have considered using it. The app is way too easy and dumbed down.
I have to correct you, because Ben is the COO, not the co-CEO. Ben handles the operations and money side of things. His prior work experience was as an investment analyst, so although he is the co-founder, Ed is legally the boss, and apparently calls the shots.
@amanda-norrsken, As @Arete_Hime said: [quote=“Arete_Hime, post:4, topic:12234”]
We’re slowly being boiled here
[/quote]
I think they will keep eliminating the features of the web site, little by little, until there is nothing left, and they can “end of life” it, and go purely mobile. In my opinion, nothing else fits the pattern of behavior that we are seeing here.
They got ownership of all the community courses, and don’t need us any more. They have more than enough material to work with now to put on their apps. We are just an annoying inconvenience for them at this point.
Sadly, I think you might be right
They are removing all the things that I loved about the website. I think their plan is to focus entirely on the memrise-created courses and leave the community-created ones to die
It is very likely too that their goal was to do massive data collection on us as a population and see whether certain community course type approaches and so on would lead to the most amount of learning. I personally can conceive a lot ways I could use the entirety of the data that Memrise generated from the web-based approach. Based upon native language, what language you’re learning, average retention rate vs. complexity of vocabulary, and even the number of words you learn over time. These data decisions could have shown how in certain portions of the population mnemonics were not statistically significantly effective. With myself - i certainly found the anecdote to be true… though of course attachment of certain information with context is my “mnemonic” of choice rather than some picture or text which sounds like something else in a language I know.
This would be impossible with the app I think because the number of casual users is far too great. But from the top 10,000 users of Memrise… or over 10 million points, you could do some great big data analysis on that treasure trove of information to infer the general populations learning patterns. My guess is they used that to gain traction and academic connections, and eventually justify their new approach.
Good point. I think that data collection was, and still is, very important to them. They track everything we do on the web site, and even in these forums, very intensively, in minute, granular detail. I can’t comment on the app, but I’ve looked at the home-grown tracking script that they use on the web site, and they also use a commercial tracking script called snowplow, which is very intrusive and some would consider to be privacy invading. They are very keen on collecting our usage data and patterns.
I don’t buy that. First of all, the most important thing that should have been tackled but until now never was is the review interval. That everyone still has the same review interval regardless if you’re 9 or 99 or if you’re learning Spanish or Japanese tells us that any research that is being done isn’t resulting in much. Also the 6 repetitions when you’re first learning the word. Also the inevitable guessing in the multiple choice tests, resulting in wrong review intervals.
If you study things, it’s also useful to vary things and note any effects, and we’ve never seen evidence of any varying.
Secondly, you want to make the product as foolproof as possible. It is undisputed as far as I know that the more connections you make to a new piece of knowledge and the more time you spend with it the better, and that humans are lazy. The lazy, foolish, human isn’t going to make a mem. (She is going to choose the one carefully created by Memrise staff for the official courses, she doesn’t want to see too many other ones to distract her) If a mem isn’t available, she isn’t going to make a mem, resulting in worse learning.
Thirdly, despite the second point, let’s design a study on the usefulness of mems. (Or maybe let’s do that later…)
What I could see is Memrise seeing dozens or hundreds of user-created mems per word in their official courses and thinking, there’s got to be a better way, but not being too clear on what that better way would be and as a result we have this, hopefully temporary, stopgap.
I can’t imagine they would do away with the web version entirely. Learning at home on a decent computer is much better than on a smartphone while commuting. I can imagine they also need a mobile version, but if they have only a mobile version, they won’t find much supporters anymore.
) . I suspect the whole move of bringing in Daniel Zohar 4 years ago was to finaly get solely a mobile platform, as Ed Cooke wanted.