A new free teaching tool! Feedback from English teachers would be greatly appreciated

LanguageCloudHe · 17 May 2012

Hey everyone!

I am currently part of a startup related to language education. We are reaching out to language teachers for support.
We've built a new learning management system (LMS) with management tools, learning tools, and social features to make it easier for language teachers to manage all of their classes. The new LMS is called Language Cloud (http://languagecloud.co).
We're looking for language teachers to use Language Cloud in their classes and provide us with feedback. As a self-funded startup, we aren't able to offer a cash incentive, but we can offer our services and support to the teachers for FREE - forever.
We would greatly appreciate your support!
Please try our demo and tell us what you think. Afterwards, if you are interested in getting a FREE language cloud set up for you school, please message me and I can help get you started!
I have experience privately tutoring through small companies and am trying to make something that can really help improve language education both for students and teachers in Japan! Thank you!

If you are interested, please contact me through PM or through gmail: language.cloud.help@gmail.com

TanakaShinichir · 17 May 2012

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Glenski · 17 May 2012

How is this any better/different than Moodle?

TanakaShinichir · 17 May 2012

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LanguageCloudHe · 18 May 2012

Glenski said:
How is this any better/different than Moodle?

Language Cloud runs on cloud computing therefore we are responsible for maintenance of the site.
The system resembles Facebook in order to make it easier for students as well as teachers who are familiar with Facebook to use this system. Unlike Moodle where many of the functions are clunky and difficult to use or locate, Language Cloud is easy on the eye and everything is intuitive. The buttons are easy to see and all the features are easy on the eye.
As for the features:
It is designed towards language teaching so it offers features to help out language teachers that Moodle doesn't offer.
Flash cards are commonly used in and out of the classroom when it comes to language learning so we have made flash cards electronic. These flash cards will automatically be formatted when printing out and many other features are soon to come. Voice recording and images for flash cards for students to be able to use flash cards for visual and audio practice.
We have a clean notebook system that allows teachers as well as students to organize and save notes online. Instead of having to look through pages of notes, you can use the search function to look through all your notes for key words in an instance. You can create an unlimited amount of notebooks and have notes in each.
The dictionary function allows a student to hover over any word on the page and have a number of definitions pop up instantly.

The teacher can post videos on the newsfeed and have students comment on it directly. Many teachers worry about pronunciation issues but with this, you will be able to have students listen to proper pronunciation outside of the classroom. Students can also upload files and videos. Assignments can be done online and corrections can be made on comments students make for assignments. The student will see a side by side comparison of the original submitted answer and the corrected version with all the corrections highlighted in multiple colors.

All these features are designed to allow the teacher to extend the learning outside of the classroom. We want to make it easier to reach out to students and easier for students to reach out to other students and the teacher through social media.

There are a number of other features but I recommend you take a tour of the demo and explore!
We are constantly working on more features and we are looking for trial teachers because we need your input!
We value your feedback and any suggestions made will be taken into account. We will be looking to implement the best ideas we receive from teachers as soon as possible.

Thank you! If you have anymore questions I would be happy to answer them!I

Glenski · 18 May 2012

Facebook itself sucks, and Japanese don't like it. the FB format you have is not what teachers would uses. Moodle offers that appearance with its blog function. Your overall format with a central message/contact columen running down the middles, surrounded by blocks of data or links is identical to Moodle.

Sorry, but I see nothing new here.

LanguageCloudHe · 18 May 2012

Glenski said:
Facebook itself sucks, and Japanese don't like it. the FB format you have is not what teachers would uses. Moodle offers that appearance with its blog function. Your overall format with a central message/contact columen running down the middles, surrounded by blocks of data or links is identical to Moodle.

Sorry, but I see nothing new here.

And of course you are entitled to your opinion.

Moodle lacks learning management tools and we are trying to provide them.
I have personally talked to many teachers who use Moodle and they are very dissatisfied with the Moodle format. The only way many teachers I have talked to use Moodle is for uploading files. I have talked to students as well and they are even more dissatisfied with Moodle.
Our site includes flashcards, notebooks, online assignments and many more features that Moodle does not have. We are currently developing voice recording functions that will make pronunciation practice much easier outside of the classroom. Uploading videos and files is easy and requires only a few clicks of the mouse. Moodle's programming is old and the interface is old fashion as well.
The newsfeed will show news from all classes or if a teacher has multiple classes, it will show news from individual classes separately. Organization is the key here. Facebook has 800 million users who repeatedly come back and we believe it will be easy for users to switch over from Facebook if many of the features are similarly placed. We are targeting language teachers and a large number of them are familiar with Facebook. Like Facebook, our site has notifications that prioritize assignments and admin announcements at the top.
Of course some of the basic features are the same as Moodle and this can not be avoided as basics are a necessity but to say there is nothing new is a bit misleading in my opinion.

Glenski · 19 May 2012

LanguageCloudHe said:
I have personally talked to many teachers who use Moodle and they are very dissatisfied with the Moodle format. The only way many teachers I have talked to use Moodle is for uploading files.

Then you just found one teacher of many who do far more than that. I suggest you expand your survey and get the real lowdown.

I have talked to students as well and they are even more dissatisfied with Moodle.

What were their specific complaints? And, did the institution itself have the problem (e.g., server issues), or was it actually Moodle that caused their dissatisfaction? Tell us the whole story here.

Our site includes flashcards, notebooks, online assignments and many more features that Moodle does not have.

I believe Moodle does 2/3 of those things, perhaps even all. Of course, you aren't really describing the differences here, so it's impossible to say what you really mean.

We are currently developing voice recording functions that will make pronunciation practice much easier outside of the classroom.

I believe Moodle has already done this or is in the process like you, too.

Uploading videos and files is easy and requires only a few clicks of the mouse. Moodle's programming is old and the interface is old fashion as well.

Your information is out of date with regard to uploading files and videos, and your description of its interface is biased (as I wrote earlier, your interface is nearly identical in many aspects, and for things like a Facebook format, not every likes it).

The newsfeed will show news from all classes or if a teacher has multiple classes, it will show news from individual classes separately.

What "news" is this? I can see everything from all of my classes.

Organization is the key here. Facebook has 800 million users who repeatedly come back and...

Blah, blah, blah. Pay attention! Most Japanese do not like Facebook. And the population of disgruntled foreigners is growing, too.

LanguageCloudHe · 19 May 2012

I have talked to many teachers from Sophia and Komazawa University. These universities are planning to switch from Moodle to a better service.
As for the students, this is how the hundred or so students I have talked to describe there Moodle experience. The formatting is poor, the functions are old and are difficult to use. They log on to download material and exit. Again these are students from some of the best English programs in Japan saying this. I talked to students at Hosei and other universities. They use a similar system and all the teachers there do is upload files as well. Moodle users only use only this function because the others, even if they exist as you preach, are poorly done or difficult to use.
We are targeting language students and most of them use Facebook. I don't understand where you are getting information like language teachers and students hate the Facebook format because I know of hundreds of students who use Facebook for a number of reasons. JALT teachers use Facebook groups to share information and I know a number of other groups for other programs exist for the same reason. Of course we can not please everyone. That is a ridiculous claim to make.
Voice recording functions do not exist on Moodle. I have had teachers tell me about how they use a different program to voice record and have to convert and upload the file. They complain about how time consuming this is.
All the news comes up on your screen because you have not gone into or tried to make a specific class.
The point of this thread was to have teachers trial it and give us feedback. If you have nothing positive to say that will help us make our website better, please refrain from posting. We want to help teachers and are looking for suggestions as to what to add to the website.
If you believe our website is so much like Moodle, give us suggestions as to what would make our site better than Moodle instead of picking at it without suggestions to help us. We would appreciate suggestions greatly.

Glenski · 20 May 2012

If you don't want to hear the negative side of things, you are not doing a fair comparison. Listening only to the positive stuff is bad business, so please don't tell people what they can and cannot post.

All of the English teachers I know who use Moodle are very happy with it. Perhaps the Hokkaido people know more than the ones you contacted. To just post a link or info and do nothing more, like use a blog or online quiz or MoodleReader or feedback survey, etc. just shows how ignorant and naive those teachers are about what Moodle can do. Don't tell me Moodle is limited when I know for a fact that it is not.

Colleague of mine who uses Moodle extensively has this to say about your site vs. Moodle.
From just looking at the front page of the site I can't tell too much. It seems that it is only for English language, Moodle can used for any subject. It also seems to be only English, but Moodle can handle all major languages. There doesn't seem to be a quiz feature and of course there is no MoodleReader.

There are people working on a recording feature, so that should be coming. My guess that the language cloud would lock you in like Facebook, but from Moodle 2.0 there is an API that allows it to hook in to many outside services. A lot of times people who say they are only using Moodle to upload files aren't getting the support they need from their institution or they are not willing to put in the time themselves to learn what Moodle has to offer. For them MS Word is just a typewriter.

Mike Cash · 20 May 2012

Goodness gracious. How did we ever manage to learn anything before we had computers and the Internet?

Glenski · 20 May 2012

Chalkboard, paper, pencil, homework... uh-oh. We STILL use those!

Obviously, people who use Moodle (or any other CMS) just by posting links are the same types who think they can present a whole lecture by using Powerpoint. Idiots. Both are tools to enhance the teaching, not replace it.

nekojita · 20 May 2012

My institution also uses Moodle for some self-guided courses (IT skills, that sort of thing). I've never really used it, myself (I don't teach, my only interaction with undergraduates is occasional assistance with projects). Perhaps I should work through one of the open courses for comparison; I've always thought of these sort of things as more useful for distance learning.

I looked at the OP's site, anyway.

Generally: Is it just me, or is the site a bit slow? e.g. news feed looks blank for a couple of seconds before it loads. Yes, this is not the world's fastest computer, nor am I on the world's best connection, but I've seen students using worse. A site like this should be streamlined to work on a smartphone with a not particularly good wifi connection. Useful functions currently missing: timetable (for classes) calendar (for events, assignment/test dates, etc).

Some of the features are not particularly intuitive - for example, as "Admin" you have the ability to make a general announcement. However, this can't be done by the general "post a message" feature at that appears when you first log in - you have to click on "School Info".

Groups don't appear to be in any way lockable - e.g. someone creating the "English Film Club" presumably wants it to be open access, but in my version of the demo, an unruly student just joined the teacher's group and spammed it with a few uploads of suspicious .exe files (okay, actually a plug-in installer I had on my desktop, but still). You might want to look into that.

On the student side:
"News feed" isn't filterable, so announcements and class assignments are mixed up with other chatter. The only way to get to the list of assignments otherwise appears to be to go to each class listing separately. Considering the case of a student taking multiple classes, there should be some way to show all due assignments.

Flashcard feature is pretty basic. The only way to add new flashcards appears to be to click one, type something in, click another, type the answer in. e.g. no way to import/export in bulk. It's not clear whether sets of flashcards can be made shared, or how to do so. There are some pretty slick flashcard programs out there already, for those who like that sort of thing; I don't see why it should have to be tied into a system that you have to be online and log into.

Pop-up dictionary has a fatal flaw - it can't parse words if there is punctuation attached, presumably because it assumes all word boundaries are spaces, so any word at the end of a sentence comes up "entry not found". That's just sloppy work. Also, some of the translations are really weird/incomplete (イングリッシュ is the only thing that comes up for English).

Teacher side:
With assignments, similar issues. How would I, particularly if I had a larger class size, do things like:
Assuming these were longer assignments, download all attached files (preferably with filenames automatically changed to identify class, assignment, and student name), so that I could work through them without having to be logged into the system.
Identify which students had overdue assignments, or bring up a list of submitted/overdue assignments by one particular student.
Actually, I can't see how to create an assignment with a set due date, other than writing something like "by Monday" in the description.
Flashcards - not really much use to a teacher if there isn't a "share this set with the following classes" button.

Glenski · 21 May 2012

If you just wanted to beta test this, you should have asked the admin on this site if they felt it was ok.

LanguageCloudHe · 22 May 2012

Glenski said:
If you don't want to hear the negative side of things, you are not doing a fair comparison. Listening only to the positive stuff is bad business, so please don't tell people what they can and cannot post.

All of the English teachers I know who use Moodle are very happy with it. Perhaps the Hokkaido people know more than the ones you contacted. To just post a link or info and do nothing more, like use a blog or online quiz or MoodleReader or feedback survey, etc. just shows how ignorant and naive those teachers are about what Moodle can do. Don't tell me Moodle is limited when I know for a fact that it is not.

Colleague of mine who uses Moodle extensively has this to say about your site vs. Moodle.
From just looking at the front page of the site I can't tell too much. It seems that it is only for English language, Moodle can used for any subject. It also seems to be only English, but Moodle can handle all major languages. There doesn't seem to be a quiz feature and of course there is no MoodleReader.

There are people working on a recording feature, so that should be coming. My guess that the language cloud would lock you in like Facebook, but from Moodle 2.0 there is an API that allows it to hook in to many outside services. A lot of times people who say they are only using Moodle to upload files aren't getting the support they need from their institution or they are not willing to put in the time themselves to learn what Moodle has to offer. For them MS Word is just a typewriter.

Of course I expected negative feedback. I was hoping to receive negative feedback with some sort of suggestion as to how to fix the problem :/.
If you could refer me to your friends so I could ask them about how they use Moodle and what they like about it I would really appreciate it! We can learn a lot from these Hokkaido people.
I appreciate your friends feedback! This site is aimed at English teachers in Japan but we are working on translations. We are working on quiz functions as well as others. We have only been up for about a month so it is taking some time. Sorry :/.

nekojita said:
My institution also uses Moodle for some self-guided courses (IT skills, that sort of thing). I've never really used it, myself (I don't teach, my only interaction with undergraduates is occasional assistance with projects). Perhaps I should work through one of the open courses for comparison; I've always thought of these sort of things as more useful for distance learning.

I looked at the OP's site, anyway.

Generally: Is it just me, or is the site a bit slow? e.g. news feed looks blank for a couple of seconds before it loads. Yes, this is not the world's fastest computer, nor am I on the world's best connection, but I've seen students using worse. A site like this should be streamlined to work on a smartphone with a not particularly good wifi connection. Useful functions currently missing: timetable (for classes) calendar (for events, assignment/test dates, etc).

Some of the features are not particularly intuitive - for example, as "Admin" you have the ability to make a general announcement. However, this can't be done by the general "post a message" feature at that appears when you first log in - you have to click on "School Info".

Groups don't appear to be in any way lockable - e.g. someone creating the "English Film Club" presumably wants it to be open access, but in my version of the demo, an unruly student just joined the teacher's group and spammed it with a few uploads of suspicious .exe files (okay, actually a plug-in installer I had on my desktop, but still). You might want to look into that.

On the student side:
"News feed" isn't filterable, so announcements and class assignments are mixed up with other chatter. The only way to get to the list of assignments otherwise appears to be to go to each class listing separately. Considering the case of a student taking multiple classes, there should be some way to show all due assignments.

Flashcard feature is pretty basic. The only way to add new flashcards appears to be to click one, type something in, click another, type the answer in. e.g. no way to import/export in bulk. It's not clear whether sets of flashcards can be made shared, or how to do so. There are some pretty slick flashcard programs out there already, for those who like that sort of thing; I don't see why it should have to be tied into a system that you have to be online and log into.

Pop-up dictionary has a fatal flaw - it can't parse words if there is punctuation attached, presumably because it assumes all word boundaries are spaces, so any word at the end of a sentence comes up "entry not found". That's just sloppy work. Also, some of the translations are really weird/incomplete (イングリッシュ is the only thing that comes up for English).

Teacher side:
With assignments, similar issues. How would I, particularly if I had a larger class size, do things like:
Assuming these were longer assignments, download all attached files (preferably with filenames automatically changed to identify class, assignment, and student name), so that I could work through them without having to be logged into the system.
Identify which students had overdue assignments, or bring up a list of submitted/overdue assignments by one particular student.
Actually, I can't see how to create an assignment with a set due date, other than writing something like "by Monday" in the description.
Flashcards - not really much use to a teacher if there isn't a "share this set with the following classes" button.

We are almost done with the calendar feature . Again, we've only been up for a month so it is taking us time to get all the features in order. Thank you for all the insights. We are working on getting a better sourced dictionary to support our website and as for the punctuation bug, I will tell IT about it immediately.
Thank you for picking up on some of the specific flaws of our site. We will try and fix them as soon as possible but we have a lot of features we are currently working on and would like to add and this is very time consuming.

I appreciate all the feedback from everyone! Thank you Genski for putting the features of Moodle into perspective for me.

Glenski · 22 May 2012

LanguageCloudHe said:
Of course I expected negative feedback. I was hoping to receive negative feedback with some sort of suggestion as to how to fix the problem :/.
If you could refer me to your friends so I could ask them about how they use Moodle and what they like about it I would really appreciate it! We can learn a lot from these Hokkaido people.

My colleagues are quite satisfied with Moodle, and some of them actually make changes/modifications themselves, so I don't think the would be particularly enthused about trying to help another party create a competitor's product. Sorry, but that's just the reality. If you are ever available to visit, you should take in the Moodle Moot annual conference and sniff around there. Beware those who like Moodle, though.

I appreciate all the feedback from everyone! Thank you Genski for putting the features of Moodle into perspective for me.

Who? There's room there for a snippy remark about proofreading names, but I'll just let it go because it seems that lately nobody can spell my simple name right on forums. I can't understand why.

johnnyG · 22 May 2012

I use moodle occasionally, and it's hard to imagine a self-funded single entity/small biz coming up with any reasonably competitive system. Moodle's been thru quite a few iterations, which equals the benefit of deep experience. There are any number of people freely collaborating on its development, and the modules that it uses. Even the paid-for proprietary apps have a hard time competing.

Also, I agree with most all the points the Grenski has made...

Also, also, since nobody has mentioned it, Google Docs is pretty decent for sharing certain kinds of things, too.

Glenski · 22 May 2012

To add to what johnnyG wrote, my colleague told me today that Moodle's top 2 competitors could not compete, so they ended up knuckling under and doing something cooperatively with Moodle, paying to do so.
Blackboard Buys 2 Leading Supporters of Open-Source Competitor Moodle

Note: Blackboard's use is "falling":
http://www.learninghouse.com/blog/infrastructure/major-learning-management-systems

LanguageCloudHe · 22 May 2012

Thank you for the heads up!
I will take a look at those articles.
Sorry about spelling your name wrong before, I have corrected it in the post above.

A new free teaching tool! Feedback from English teachers would be greatly appreciated

LanguageCloudHe

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