lechuck said:

Now that you’ve had some time to browse LearnHub, give us some feedback.

What do you like? What don’t you? What would you like to see added or changed?

Don’t be shy. We want to hear what you really think.

Fire at will!

Peter Blomert said:

As i learned in between, i can add pictures to my lessons.

What i dream of: To be able to add media to all my replies, post etc. (Means without having to put it online elsewhere first)

On top of that: it would be more than great if we could add these media (pictures, graphs, documents, sound files, podcasts, videos etc) by simply dragging them onto the post/reply/whatelse. Pictures would be resized to fit and show the big version onclick, documents would be stored in a safe place and a thumbnail would expand onclick (Leopard-like) etc.

As i said – dreams

NormGreen said:

Peter we’ve definitely got that on the roadmap! (at least the first part.)

There’s not good reason not to let people have a full editor for discussion comments, etc.

The drag-n-drop stuff is complicated, maybe impossible. We’ll see about that.

Peter Blomert said:

I uploaded my first video – the quality of the translation is marvelous, the speed is unbelievable! Great implementation! Will you add full-screen-support, too?

Peter Blomert said:

One idea concerning usability of the design:

When i go to the discussion-page, the discussion-tab highlights, a list of discussions shows up. When i choose one discussion, i am transported to this discussion – and the discussion-tab stays highlighted.

Can you think of a more intuitiv design – for me anyway it was not clear that i have to click the already highlighted tab to come back to the discussion-page with the list of discussions. Perhaps shouldn’t the tab stay highlighted, perhaps you could work with breadcrumbs to show the actual location the user is on …

i really don’t know, just stumbled upon that…

Peter Blomert said:

Hi, here a little suggestion to enhance the usability of the platform

in discussions etc the user should be able to reorganize the order of appearance (newest first versus oldest first) and the page-indicator should also be inserted at the top of the page.

Peter Blomert said:

As i mentioned in the bug-section already, for the lesson-editor import-functionality for a variety of common document-types (e.g. word, excel, ppt) seems crucial to me.

Peter Blomert said:

to create lessons for science-subjects it would be great if you had some formel-editor-functionality at hand for the lesson-editor, too (could be substituted by an improved import-functionality though).

Peter Blomert said:

Here is another suggestion from a teacher point of view: Downloadable material The teachers should be enabled to provide their students course-related or lesson-related material for download. This material should be stored on the platform (not elsewhere with linking to this other storage). The material should be linkable so that the teachers can link to the same Material from different lessons and courses

Peter Blomert said:

Here is another suggestion from a teacher point of view: Printerfriendly view of lessons, discussions, tests, perhaps courses

The students should be enabled to print out nearly everything found on the platform. Perhaps in PDF-Format, or maybe with special print-css.

lechuck said in response to:

This is a great idea. I’ve thought about this before. I’ve seen it done in both Science and Math forums. It would be a great tool both within the lesson editor and the discussions/debates/comments. If a student needed help with a math question instructors and students alike could help out.

This will be a future feature no doubt.

lechuck said in response to:

We plan on upgrading the lesson editor in the near future. We will be fixing a lot of bugs as well as adding a host of new features.

We are planning to do both download-able content (restricting uploads to .pdf, .txt, .doc, .rtf, etc.) and printable lessons.

Peter Blomert said:

The test-area could use some enhancement, i think.

Besides multiple choice questions think about open questions (without fixed answer but with an answer-text-field and an explanation after completing the test)

For science-tests the answer also could be a graph, a drawing or something like that.

For mimicking manipulatives, flash-files or java-applets should be possible (e.g. for combining molecules to test an equation of a chemical reaction, for arranging different parts in a corrrect order etc. )

There definitely are more things to think about, but i am nearly braindead today – so, just play with my thoughts :-)

Peter Blomert said:

Hi Adam,

as the tests got mixed up a few times in between, i have a new suggestion: the test-taker should be able to ask for further explanation, and that action should be made as simple as possible.

Perhaps there are some improvements over the message-model i used now a few times (like clicking into the explanation-area opens a pop-up or a text field to send the question to the creator of the test, giving the creator automatically all infomation about the test-part in question etc etc)

Peter Blomert said:

had some fun tonight while successfully trying to fool the trivia scoring!

suggestions:

you should be able to skip a question

you should be able to restart you personal scoring

you never should get the same question a second time – not without restarting your personal scoring, anyway

Peter Blomert said:

suggestions for the tests:

the teacher should be able not only to give explanation but to give an explanation to a question specificly corresponding to the answer the student has chosen, so that the teacher can react appropriately to the specific mistake and the wrong comprehension of the student.

Peter Blomert said:

Who is online?

Wouldn’t it be a great feature to see a list of the users online at the moment?

Could be specified to show only the users of those communities (or schools, or courses) you are a member (a leader, a creator) of.

Could lead to an important increase of messaging and contacts between users, personal and content-related.

Peter Blomert said:

The following definitely isn’t meant for the first public launch, but please have a look at

http://www.spinvox.com

This service allows to speak into the phone and get the words translated into formatted text to receive e.g. as SMS or E-mail or blog-article…

Seems to me there are unbelievable uses for this service on a learning-platform!

RAZIM said:

Is there going to be some integration with other social communities? Facebook, for example.

Notifications of new messages/tests/courses cross-linked into your profile would be helpful for those who have a social community integrated into their life in one way or another.

This would also be useful for advertising to other users about learnhub and attract interest from those who otherwise wouldn’t know about it. It would also provide mobile support for notifications for those who use the mobile service to access their facebook profile on their cell/blackberry/mobile pc.

I know there are cons to this as well. Just thought I’d put this out there and see if there was interest in it.

lechuck said in response to:

Interesting idea Chris. It would be nice to have a little application, “I use LearnHub” that updates you much like the activity feeder does. All your friends would see that “RAZIM created the course **”.

I’m sure this could be a future idea. Thanks :)

lechuck said in response to:

That thing is AWESOME. I think there is this program out there with the name Dragon in it. It allows you to voice all the written text on your computer. Used in word docs, web, etc. I will see if I can find it. Definitely would be a useful tool especially for a lot of people out there who want to write lessons.

lechuck said in response to:

We have future plans for this. I could see it being really useful in communities. You can see what members of a community is logged on just in case you really need to talk to them. As well it would be great if you can see what friends of yours are online.

I know I’ve been talking about a really cool system that would work wonders in this area.

Future development no doubt!

lechuck said in response to:

Some great ideas. I agree you should be able to skip a question. I have no interest in doing a lot of topics… like math…

As for resetting your scoring, I’m not so sure about that. This is testing your general knowledge, if you don’t know it. Go learn about it! Your scoring can be a good reminder how far you’ve come!

As well, I’m not sure how fair it would be to people who got the question right the first time if someone can just reset their score and redo it after seeing what the correct answer was.

Peter Blomert said in response to:

At the moment, you CAN redo a trivia question: Simply answer the question, get the right answer, use the back-button of your browser – there you are. That is exactly, what i did that night just to proof it could be done! It is boring, but it brings you scoring points.

That behaviour should be stopped. I think you can do that by marking all questions already answered by a specific user, so a second answer wouldn’t be accepted.

lechuck said in response to:

Thanks Peter, we’ll get that fixed.

lechuck said:

By the way, the program for using voice typing is Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Not sure why the dragon is in there but here is the link:

Peter Blomert said:

The discussion about the way the trivia-quizzes work could be transferred to discuss all the testing:

Tests, that is my opinion, normally should be redoable.

The reasons: Given a test should help the student to assess his knowledge about the content of a course or a lesson, the best workflow from a teachers perspective would be:

The students does the test – The student gets his results – For every answer the student gets some explanation or some links to gain deeper unterstanding of the issue tackled with in the question – The student follows the explanation and the links and learns about the issue – The student does the test again to check if he now gained a deeper understanding.

For this workflow to work, we need the following design of a test (let us concentrate on multiple-choice-tests here, because otherwise the discussion would be to complex for me to handle in a post)

First – there is the test – a number of question with multiple choices for answers

Second – there is the result-page, which for every question does the following

telling the student if he was right, perhaps with some further explanation why this answer is right.

When the student answered wrong, the result-page DOESN’T give away the right answer but gives the student some further information about the issue or some links to further investigate the issue. These explanations and links depend on which wrong answer the student has chosen and deal with the students specific misconception of the issue that the wrong choice revealed.

Third – after the student followed the links provided for every wrong answer he is entitled to redo the test – his scoring is resetted and he can start over.

This should be the user experience with all tests for assessment – only tests for grading or final exams should do otherwise – no explanation, just scoring, giving away the right answer for every question and no second chance but by special permission of the tutor/teacher.

What do you think about that – is this implementable? Should we go this way?

lechuck said in response to:

Great suggestions. The team and I will talk about this and when we do a future update of Tests we will think about implementing some of these ideas.

Peter Blomert said:

What is the role-concept behind learnhub?

At the moment it seems to the normal betatester, that everybody may do everything. Will this policy change for some sort of admin-instructor-student hierarchy, perhaps organized by community or by school ?

there are pros and cons for both concepts – maybe a mix of both (e.g. communities and schools work differently) would be the best.

What are your plans concerning user-roles (this may be connected to your business-plans)

I am very interested to get more information about these issues

Peter Blomert said:

Suggestion concerning the quoting in discussions:

Especially when quoting longer discussion-posts, a way to quote a post only partially – e.g. by highlighting the portion of the post you want to be cited – would come in handy!

Peter Blomert said:

I do a lot of typos or just write horrible English – therefore i would like to have the possibility to correct messages the same way i can do that with discussion posts.

Peter Blomert said:

I tried to use some javascript in a lesson – that didn’t work.

Would like to see a way to tackle with the source-code of the lesson (html/javascript)

That would improve immensely the possibilities for the knowledgeable user to create complex lessons.

Peter Blomert said:

Suggestions concerning Trivia:

Trivia should be editable after publishing – for correcting mistakes, typos, unclear questions etc.

Trivia should be able to be reassigned to more than one community.

Peter Blomert said:

Think about changing the edit-possibilities of discussion-posts:

Why not let the author of a post edit his post any time until somebody replied to his post?

Often i think it would be great if i could tweak my last post for clarification – but then normally the edit-window of 10 minutes already closed.

After someone else replied to a post, editing should be forbidden to keep the dialog authentic.

Peter Blomert said:

Suggestion for the behaviour of the “activity”-window on Home:

At the moment the activity shows “created the lesson…” even when i only edited a lesson formerly published. If you – as I often do – have to correct your lesson, therefore edit your lesson a few times in a short period of time, the activity-window is filled with all that editing-garbage.

You could change that either to show “updated the lesson …” or “edited the lesson…”, or imho even better: skip those editing-processes completely from the activity-list.

Peter Blomert said:

Suggestions for tests:

first: please add the opportunity to create questions with more than one correct answer! (E.g. 3 out of 5 etc)

second: tests have to be editable after publishing – otherwise you never can improve a test without having to write it new completely from the scratch – why burden the author with a lot of boring repetitional work?

Peter Blomert said:

Suggestions for test-statistics:

I t would be great if an author of a test could see – perhaps in a diagramm – the test-outcome per question, if possible per answer, e.g. “question 3: 20 answers, 5xa, 4xb, 9xc, 2xd”.

That way the teacher knows which question created a problem for his students, which misconceptions are the most popular etc. – pure nuggets for his further planning of the course!

Peter Blomert said:

Suggestion: chat (real-time-conversation)

Would be great if you could easily chat with other users online without leaving the platform for another application. Just ping a user and start chatting – this feature would definitely strengthen the communicative approach of the platform!

(This feature had to be combined with the feature of seeing who is online as suggested in a former post)

Peter Blomert said:

one suggestion: a few days ago in some discussion we posted about different interesting books. Today i was interested to reread those posts, but couldnt remember, in which discussion we had this conversation. It took me a long time, to find that discussion again. So: Could you think of a searchability of the discussions a specific user posted to? Maybe in a short time there will be a real need for such search ability – given that the number of communities, schools and therefore discussions will explode rather quickly

Peter Blomert said:

The discussion board is meant as a forum, means it is not made for real time conversations. Therefore it e.g. doesnt refresh automatically to show new posts. We should have the opportunity for chatting with each other on this platform. There is no plan for a chat-application to be found in the wireframes, so i suggest it here. Maybe tutoring embraces this functionality, but that is not the same – i thought of chatting student to student.

lechuck said in response to:

I have really high hopes for this avenue in the near future Peter. Lots of really cool ideas!

stevemac121 said:

Suggestion: Interface design. i think you need to have much stronger delineation between the different part s of the website. I think peter mentioned before about trying to find an old post.

I honestly believe you need to look at this. it is in your own interests to make it clear and obvious where to go and what to do. The interface is ok, but I think if you take a long hard look at it, you will be able to improve the interface and make it more enjoyable for users.

I have not spent much time analysing, just my gut feeling – If i caome up with any ideas i’ll let you know

regards Steve

stevemac121 said:

INTERFACE DESIGN – I WOULD DEFINITELY USE THE WORKSPACE DOUBLE NAVIGATION BAR AS THE BASIS FOR THE COMMUNITY AND HOME PAGE – adjust menus accordingly.

That would be SOLID and CONSISTENT (as an end user i want that, and so will others). Otherwise we have got 3 slightly different interfaces for each section. The workspace double navigation looks neat.

stevemac121 said:

Tests: Not keen on centralized text for question, Order of choices got changed around. No blank lines allowed in the explanation – looks like no whitespacing allowed