Emurse Under the Hood: Lessons, Segments and Cards

This month, we've made two updates to the card types used in Emurse lessons. This will allow us to have an even broader range of content and study modes in our lessons. Our speaking and reading card types now have the capability to embed a video.  We also added a multiple answer card, which allows multiple answers to be submitted on one card. If you have not used the app,  Cards are used inside of Emurse lesson content and is what the learner interacts with when the user is learning. 

Architecting an eLearing System for Learning Languages

Before we explain what cards are, it would be good to describe the overall architecture of courses and lessons.

A course can have zero or more lessons associated with it.  Each lesson has a series of segments that contain the information that the learner will be seeing and studying.  Each segment has a card type and data associated with it.  There are main kinds of cards: automatic and text.  Text cards allow static rich-text content to be embedded in the lesson.  Text cards are useful for explaining concepts such as grammar.   Automatic cards use a list of terms and present them to the user in a particular way such as multiple choice questions and two-sided flash cards.  In Emurse, a piece of information that a learner will study.  It can be a definition, or a specific translation of a word. 

Anki is a spaced repetition flash card program used by many foreign language learners.  It's a useful program, but it has a few flaws that we've tried to correct in Emurse.  The biggest flaw is that terms, and the way they are displayed are tightly coupled together. 

Our Special Sauce

In Emurse, we've de-coupled how the card is displayed and interacted with from the term itself.  This allows terms to be studied in many different ways.  Let's use the Thai sentence fragment "ไปวัด" - go (to) temple as an example.   The user may want to focus on learning the meaning of the phrase, or simply work on improving their reading or pronunciation skills.   Because the card is decoupled with the term, we're able to do this.  When the user practices a term, we keep track of the category (reading, speaking or memorization), a difficulty score and a few other details.  With this information, we're able to build up a targeted review session based on what the user wants to learn and how they want to learn it.