One theme that is big for us at Cerego is intelligent recommendations. We are building a system that does the heavy lifting of figuring out what you should study next so you don’t have to—you can just focus on your courses.
A step in this direction is a new feature we just rolled out: Your Recommendations. Under your Memory Bank you’ll see two blocks:
Up Next is the course we recommend you study now, and On Deck covers the courses that you should next, in order of urgency. You can scroll left and right through all your On Deck courses, and as you rollover a recommended course, you’ll see its position highlighted in your Memory Bank above.
If your Memory Bank is getting a little crowded, you can hide courses from it with a new show/hide toggle we just added to each course on your Learn page.
Flipping to hide will hide the course from your Memory Bank. To see it again, just switch back to show.
Over the past week, we’ve made the site easier to use in a number of ways.
First up, we increased the size of images in the learning app. We sympathized with everyone who felt the images were a little hard to study from. The current size should make studying much easier on the eyes!
We also got feedback that for certain courses the study timer was too short, so we doubled the timer length. And if the timer is still too fast for you, you can now go into the app settings area and turn it off.
There’s also a new interface for adding images (either for course images or items). In addition to uploading your own images or searching Flickr, you can also link to the url to any image on the web.
Finally, we made a few more minor tweaks to the course edit page. We added a learn button at the top so you don’t have to scroll down past all your items to study anymore, and we added a “Go to course” button to return to the main course view.
Next up is a number of major new features including:
More on those very soon!
Today we’re excited and happy to open our new service, Cerego.com, to a public beta. Anyone who has requested an invite already will receive an invite today, and starting from today we will be letting in as many users as we can manage. If you don’t get an invite right away, please be patient, and you’ll hear from us soon!
Cerego is our new tool for learning anything—from geography and science to history and languages. We help you learn faster, remember longer, and manage your memory in the cloud. We see Cerego as a powerful companion to almost any kind of learning, from a classroom course to online resources.
Visualization is a key component of how we help you manage your memory, and the centerpiece of this is the Memory Bank. Think of the Memory Bank as a personalized, real-time view of everything you’ve learned and how well you’ve learned it. The Memory Bank lets you know the last time you studied a course, that course’s memory strength and activation, and which courses you need to study now—courses marked with a red exclamation point are “urgent” and should be studied next.
The Memory Bank also works at the item level. An item is the basic learning block in Cerego. It can be a word, a date, an image, or a sound, and the associated information that you’re trying to learn. You can study items in a course (a collection of items) or a set (a collection of courses). After every study session, animation in the Memory Bank shows you exactly what you’ve learned, and how well you’ve learned it, on an item-by-item level. On item roll-over you can see detailed progress metrics for that item.
You can make your own courses and items to study whatever you want, but we recommend you first try out an existing course to get a feel for how the learning experience works. In the Find tab, you’ll see a selection of Featured Courses made by us, staff, friends, and early alpha users. As the community starts to build its own library of content, this area will morph into a directory highlighting the best of what we have.
This is an early beta, so what you see today is just a hint of what is to come. But we can let you know that some of the areas we’re focusing on next include a bulk uploader (so you can upload content more efficiently), tools and content customized for language learning, and functionality for mobile devices. And in the Feedback section, please let us know what you’d like to see next!
