September 1, 2022

What is coming for the new and improved education section? Everything! Let's break it down to make it easy to understand.

Design

Everything in regards to the education section will be receiving a makeover. This includes the Home Page, all the modules on the side panel, the vocabulary tracker and flash cards system, and just about every other feature under the sun! Everything is being refurnished.

Compatibility

With the new design changes, a significant amount of compatibility improvements will be made for users across different browsers and platforms. Additionally, better care will be taken to ensure that users have the best experience possible with improved conditional cases.

New Lesson and Course Editor

Presently the course and lesson editor has to be done by hand. Every piece of HTML you see rendered in each lesson is written out in an editor. The new editor that is being tested throughout the site to compose new threads or manage the club wiki for example will be used to create new lessons. Additionally, a full back-end system will be made to better improve the author's ability to manage their own classrooms which will open up many doors as it will no longer be exclusive to Jappleng official editors but for the public as well. An authorization process will likely be needed before a user is given permission to start submitting their lessons.

What this means is that it will be vastly faster to release and edit lessons, create new courses, manage media libraries for the course/lessons and even give everyone a chance to teach something. We plan to open lessons not just about Japanese but other related courses as well.

Rewriting of Lessons and New lessons

Old lessons will be partially rewritten and also completely reformatted with the new editor. This will take some time so please bare with me as I go through each lesson and edit them. There's a lot of lessons. Likewise, after the new changes are complete, I will begin uploading new lessons and continue work on the new edition of JPLearn! which is re-written from scratch thanks to the feedback received. Many new a-la-carte lessons will be released as well.

New Sections and Features

There will be new sections and features that befit these new changes. For instance, it will be possible to track your progress on how well you know parts of a language such as Adjectives, Verbs, Nouns etc… How many Kanji you know, how many kana you know, and other progress related information. Much of it will be an automated process while some parts will require user input.

There will also be a timer system which will permit users to start and pause while studying a lesson (any lesson) and it will be recorded on a per-lesson basis as well as a total progress. This should be helpful to get feedback if people are struggling with their lessons or if people want to know how long they have been studying Japanese.

Other new features will be announced when it becomes closer to its release.

Release timeframe

As of today, the new home page along with its related modules have been released in its new format. I will be taking a 5 day vacation after submitting this post and because of this, any future release will have to wait until September 7. New features and sections will be released as they are completed.

Thank you for your continued support, I hope these changes are exciting to hear!

Improvements made for today's release (September 1, 2022)

General

New chart system to display data for the user has been implemented

Education

MENU MODULES

1. Assignments and Progress module has been completely remade
2. New doughnut chart has replaced the old one with enhanced improvements
3. Improved labeling system and support for "Started" progress within the charts
4. Hovering over a chart component will display a label for further details
5. Assignments and Progress has been divided into two different modules.
6. New assignments module  has been created. It is far better than the older one that was part of “My progress”
7. Vocabulary tracker module has been completely remade, it also supports a fancy % on how well you know the word
8. Education Apps module is now Edutainment Apps to Help you, and it has been completely remade
9. Latest lessons added to subscribed courses module is now "Newest Lessons to your subs" and it has been completely redone

HOME MODULES

1. New "News module" which is a image ticker. It supports clicking on circles to navigate between news articles and not doing anything will auto-scroll. It also supports various features and some features that are not yet implemented for the future so that when it is available, it will function on its own.
2. Newest lessons on Jappleng is now Most Recent Lessons Added and the module has been completely redone. It now expands full width instead of 50%
3. Recommended Courses is now renamed to "Today's Recommended Courses" and the module has been completely redone
4. Popular Study Groups module is now "Featured Study Groups" and the module has been completely redone
5. Latest forum activity is now known as "Latest Study Group Forum Activity" and various portions has been redone
6. Added support for users and content without result and users who are not logged in

Note 1: Latest forum activity currently displays the most recent forum activity everywhere. This will be patched later to be study groups only
Note 2: Featured study groups currently displays a list from all clubs. This will be patched later to only be study groups.

Functional

Courses enrolled in, courses completed, lessons started, lessons completed is now counted

Other Updates

I forgot to save the document that was keeping the changes and as a result I forgot exactly what other changes I made to the site… lol But it was a decent list of other changes.

That's it for today!