kantord
commented
3 years ago Thanks @zmbc this is a good point.
If you want to assist in writing this doc, I'll be happy to review a PR. It would be a very valuable contribution.
To help, I'll try to answer your questions.
What is the reasoning behind the set of challenges present, and the way they are designed?
Card challenges: these can create association between words and images. It's also useful because answering correctly technically doesn't require any pre-existing knowledge in the foreign language, as the answer can be found by looking at the pictures. Though this challenge type can only by used for certain words, it's a very useful tool to teach simple words, plus it's a way to add an easy exercise with colorful pictures in order to make LibreLingo a bit more exciting to use.
Option challenges: this is also an easy exercise since you have a set of clues in order to retrieve a word from your memory.
Short input challenges: these serve multiple reasons. One is to teach using the target language's native writing system. It's currently the only challenge type that forces you to spell out a word. Another reason is to create a more difficult type of exercise that forces you to retrieve the word without any extra clues. For now this only exists for words, but for phrases we should create another challenge type which is similar, but offers clues word-by-word using the mini-dictionary.
Listening challenge: this serves to train listening comprehension.
Chips challenge: this serves to train the user to be able to construct sentences on their own. Effectively this is meant to teach the syntactical rules of the language as well as to simply expose the learner to more complex examples.
What is the overall teaching approach LibreLingo aims for, even if not all of it is implemented yet?
I think there are multiple ways to answer this.
On one hand, LibreLingo courses should focus on teaching by example. Since one of the main factors in learning success is the time you spend learning, the courses should be easily approachable and the learning sessions should be very flexible. If the course material doesn't take a set amount of time to interact with and doesn't take a lot of preparation to start with, then the user is hopefully more encouraged to make learning a routine that they can do very regularly.
LibreLingo uses spaced repetition. Ideally spaced repetition is implemented by the course content itself (i. e. relatively rare words are repeated at increasing intervals in the course content itself), but there's no software supporting this correctly. However, repetition for already completed skills is already implemented in software.
On the other hand, it's a long term goal to fully embrace the advantages of a free software/open source/public domain nature and build tooling that will encourage greater creativity and customization. This means that a course could be forked and adapted to different environments/organizations or even be used by a private teacher to create a customized course for their student.
(more answers coming up)
zmbc
stale[bot]
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Most of LibreLingo's documentation focuses on technical aspects, or the low-level tasks involved in creating or editing a course.
However, there are many questions not answered in the documentation about LibreLingo as a teaching tool:
Describe the solution you'd like I apologize if I've missed answers to any of these questions that are already present in the documentation. I was not able to find them.
To answer some of my other questions about challenge types (see #1495) I used trial-and-error testing of the app (and dug around in the code) to find the answers. Some of these questions could be investigated the same way, but some (especially the why questions) cannot.
Additional context I am happy to assist in writing this documentation, to the extent I can be useful without knowing the answers already (see previous paragraph).