Managing Your Lesson
We often get emails from users complaining that their lesson is too large, and that they can never get through it all. Indeed, if you have 800 cards in your lesson, it's more a hindrance than a help. These cries for help usually conclude that a new feature is needed, such as 'throttling' the flow of cards into the lesson.
Although we could easily add such a feature, restricting the lesson's size, it doesn't really address the root of the problem — it just covers up the symptom, that being an enormous lesson. If you find your lesson is too big, the problem is simply that you are trying to learn too much at once. If you can't study the lesson in a day, you have too much stuff that you are trying to cram into your head.
So what is the solution? It's quite simple: manage your lesson by removing some cases from the lesson schedule. You do this by double clicking a case, and setting the lesson schedule to 'None'. Later, when your lesson is down to a respectable level again, you can go back and turn the lesson scheduling in those cases back on again. Note that you will not lose any lesson history when you do this: Mental Case will keep track of how many times you have studied the notes in the cases even when you change the schedule.
There is another advantage to this approach over letting Mental Case do it for you: you know what is most important and should be given priority. Mental Case could arbitrarily choose to leave notes out of the lesson, but it does not know which notes are least important, and which should be given priority. The user is best positioned to decide this.
Rather than trying to cover up overgrown lesson syndrome, we have chosen to keep it obvious, and empower the user to do something about it. So take control of your lesson and don't let it overpower you.
- drewmccormack's blog
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I had this issue, since I
I had this issue, since I import bulk content download from language learning websites. I get around it by having "import" cases which are not active, and a duplicate of the same case which is active. Every week, I drag 10 or so flashcards from the import case and drop them into the active case so that all the content is not coming at me at once. Importing is time consuming and prone to errors, so it makes sense to do it all at once. Perhaps you might consider adding a feature that would automate flashcards being moved from one case to another over time. You could create sleeper cases that slowly feed content into a selected active case. Right now Mental Case is designed to grab a constant stream of snippets from various sources and slowly build cases, but quite often there are learners who are focused on acquiring one complex skill, and slowly adding content that is sitting in a database elsewhere on the computer is not always practical, or a good use of time.
Best,
Gary
-夏嘉瑞-
www.garysaville.net
Trickling content
Hi Gary,
Thanks for the feedback. This is an interesting idea. We will think about it.
Kind regards,
Drew
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Drew McCormack
Mental Case Developer
Multiple Lessons?
I just started using Mental Case after using various other flash card programs for several years. I use it for studying vocabulary lists for Spanish, French, and Arabic. The "lesson" feature is the primary reason why I decided to switch to Mental Case. I really like being able to easily see all the list items that I need to study without having to manually look in each list, or Mental Case to be more precise.
However, it would be VERY useful to have multiple lessons that allow users to specify which cases or case collections belong to each list. For example, I could define a lesson for Spanish vocabulary and one for French. This could also be used to prioritize some cases and case collections over others if the number of cards gets too large.
Regards,
Steven
Multiple Lessons
Hi Steven,
Thanks for the feedback.
As I replied off list, you can already get a bit of this facility by selecting a case or collection and choosing Study Lesson Notes in Case.
Hope that helps.
Kind regards,
Drew
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Drew McCormack
Mental Case Developer
multiple lessons
I'd like to see a lesson for each case collection. I know I can right click the case collection and study the lesson notes, but it is nice to see the lesson there reminding you, with the number telling you what is necessary for study. When doing multiple languages, the single lesson is difficult. Color coding of cases (or case collections) may be helpful in this regard. Perhaps one tag (2.0 I know) could be a colored tag, and the user can choose to color according to a particular tagging system they choose?
The studying of lesson notes in case collections will be that much better when case collections come to the iPhone as well.
one more thing...
Another reason why multiple lessons for different case collections can be helpful is for fonts and theme issues. My greek flashcards use a different font than my Hebrew flashcards, etc. I can specify the font in the theme, but there is only one lesson! I'm stuck with ugly font for Hebrew cause I don't feel like changing the lesson theme every time I study. If I had, rather, a specific lesson for my Hebrew case collection, then it could have its own theme, and my Greek lesson in my Greek case collection could have its own theme.
Perhaps the font issue will be addressed better in 2.0, but if not this may be an option.....
Fonts
In version 2.0, you will be able to set default fonts for each case. So you could use one font for Hebrew, and one for Greek.
Drew
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Drew McCormack
Mental Case Developer
Great! thanks Drew
Great! thanks Drew