I think that when using paper-based flashcards to learn a subject, the material is really cemented by being able to know the subject matter "forwards and backwards". When learning a language, the basics might be built by the direction your demo site shows (hear Thai word and understand it in English), but for really building the ability to actively use the language, not just understand vocabulary, it's important to practice knowing and saying the Thai word based on the English word as the "question". Each "direction" for a node and user would ideally be recorded separately to allow a student so see how well they understand what they hear and how well they can remember and say what they have heard, which, imho, is a bit harder.

All that said, I think this is a great module. I like your Thai lessons (though I have no great interest in learning Thai right now) and look forward to seeing the feature-set built up. BTW, I'm profiling your module in my selection of interesting modules released last month (a regular blog column I write for the Cocomore Drupal blog; this month I'm a bit later than normal).

I'll spare you having a long list of issues (and myself the trouble of creating another) to suggest another feature: Optionally allow for configuring a weighted gradient for self-assessment, rather than a simple black/white (I was right / I was wrong), e.g.
5 - I knew that
4 - I was sooo close (or 'I wasn't sure, but...')
3 - I should have known that
2 - That rang a bell
1 - I had no clue

This could make for more effectively getting all cards into the "completely learned" (maybe review again in a while) "box".

Comments

drupalshrek’s picture

drupalshrek commented

Hi LoMo,

Thanks very much for your issue; it's the first issue on Flipcard, and even that is appreciated, to know that people are taking an interest. Glad to hear you like the module. Thank you for your feature request; it does seem a definitely highly-valuable enhancement to be able to flip starting from either direction. It will certainly be on my todo list.

Your second suggestion I read with interest. I know this is what some systems do, but I think the Leitner box algorithm works pretty well, and I'm not sure how the user gradient would work with the Leitner boxes, since you can't be in 20% more than box 2; you are either in box 2 or box 3. I may well however move to apparently more effective spaced-repetition time based algorithm (http://ankisrs.net/docs/dev/manual.html#spaced-repetition) which I only discovered after implementing the Leitner box algorithm. If I do that, which I would like to, this would then make sense to introduce the gradient self-assesment, since then, if, say a word was to be reviewed after 2 days and the user said they had no clue, it could be made to be reviewed 50% quicker. Anyway, for info, I have now added a couple of FAQs which explain how the Leitner box algorithm works:
http://lingopolo.com/faq/what-do-the-levels-mean-for-the-words-in-a-lesson
http://lingopolo.com/faq/how-exactly-does-this-leitner-box-system-work

I look forward to your blog article,

regards,

drupalshrek

P.S. In your blog I found it very difficult to find the main articles from the page http://drupal.cocomore.com/blog. I would reach call to action text like "Now let’s get on to the serious modules…" and I wouldn't know where to go or was confused as to whether I was supposed to be going anywhere at all or whether the text directly following on the page was what was being referred to. My suggestion would be at the end of every teaser (which is what these shorter intros effectively are), add a "Read full article" link directly to the main article page (e.g. to http://drupal.cocomore.com/blog/modules-month-september-more-interesting...).

drupalshrek’s picture

drupalshrek commented
Assigned: Unassigned » drupalshrek
lomo’s picture

lomo commented

Hi drupalshrek,

Thanks for your reply. I think I have used Flashcard apps that utilized the Leitner box algorithm before and it does work well... and you are right that there isn't really a way to 'weight' the questions with that algorithm, but after a few passes through all cards, as you start to learn them, it becomes clear which ones need to be repeated more often and the Leitner system works; it probably works just as well as anything else if you suggest people answer "no" for anything less than total mastery. What would be helpful is to see the text, too, (perhaps optionally) when doing audio cards or be able to switch between audio-only and text-only modes for the same cards. But with a language with a totally different character-set from your mother tongue (like learning Thai when English is your mother tongue), it might mean you would want to separate audio and visual learning of the language into two tasks (with progress logged separately).

Regarding the blog posts, you are right that the teasers on the /blog front-page might be a bit confusing. I thought we did have a "Read more" link at the end of the teasers. The reason I break off right before the text for each module is that there is a lot of custom styling and it wouldn't look good on Drupal.org (Planet Drupal), so I just write a special "teaser" each month. At least on Planet Drupal, there is a "read more" link below the teaser paragraphs. On our /blog page, I'll have to check when the server is up. Seems our company websites are all offline right now and I'm not sure why, but I'm not the guy who can restart the servers (I've alerted others who might be able to do that).

By the way, I finally finished up the post for the October modules on Friday (a couple weeks later than normal this month) and Flipcard is in the list. :-)