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Summary
The “Home” “Continue learning on your own” shortcuts are showing the same exercises from Khan Academy, but not in the language the learners are working in. Our Kolibri systems host two, if not 3 different language versions of Khan Academy. In our case, learners are working in the Fulfulde version of Khan early math. The tiles to continue learning are showing first a shortcut to a French-language version of a lesson. I then tested it with another lesson in Fulfulde and the shortcut tile came up pointing to an English version of the same lesson. I’ll include a screenshot below.
This creates confusion for our learners, many of whom are very new to all of this.
Technical details
Version: 0.15.12
OS: Linux-6.1.21-v8±aarch64-with-glibc2.31
Python: 3.9.2
Installer: deb kolibri-server - 0.4.0-0ubuntu2
Server: nginx/1.18.0
Database: /home/pi/.kolibri/db.sqlite3
Free disk space: 626 GB
Server time: Fri Jan 19 2024 20:03:53 GMT+0100 (West Africa Standard Time)
Server timezone: Africa/Douala
Device ID: 86a460380dbbc8ff95b31688d3694024
The following screenshot shows 2 shortcut tiles pointing to English-version lessons, but they are in reference to the same lessons that were being worked on in Fulfulde.
Hi @cjackson - thanks for this report. We have been aware of this issue for a long time, but have had limited ways to fix it, due to a historic (and poor) decision to make translated Khan Academy resources share a common identifier.
I think there is probably a path to ameliorate the experience you identify here for resources engaged with from 0.15 onwards, so I will file an issue in our bug tracker, and we can hopefully address this in a patch release on the upcoming 0.16.x series.
I just read your post about this on github. I have no idea of the technical feasibility, nor what other problems my idea would cause. I wonder if there would be a way to tag the Khan resources with the language-specific marker that Khan uses. In the case of English - “en”, with Fulfulde - “fv”, etc. Retain the current identifier, but somehow add that tag.
Again, I have no clue what I’m talking about. It’s just an idea.
Hi @cjackson - the individual resources are tagged with language tags, and they do have different identifiers to render them unique. The issue is that the identifier used to track resource completion is shared across the different languages. We do now track the other identifier as well, which is what I outlined in the issue, but changing the tracking identifier would mean wiping out historical progress, which we have assumed is not desirable (to upgrade your Kolibri channel and have all of your previous progress on resources wiped out).
Hi @cjackson - one thing to flag here is that there is already an attempt to handle this in the code, whereby it will fallback on the user interface language to prioritize the displayed resource. So if the user is browsing in Fufulde, then the Fufulde resource will be prioritized. I don’t know if this helps at all, but this was my first thought of a ‘fix’ here - and it seems like I already implemented it.
Hi @richard : What you have explained is not what is happening on our system. The default language for Kolibri server is Fulfulde (FV). The learners using the tablets are working in Kolibri in FV. In addition, they are working on Khan early math content in FV. However, the “continue learning on your own” shortcuts are randomly coming up pointing to Khan content that is in English or French, mostly English.
I just confirmed the above explanation working on a Linux laptop running Kolibri stand-alone (not from our server). Default language is FV. Worked one question in the first Khan math content in FV. Closed the exercise and then went to the “continue learning” page. The shortcut is pointing to the same exercise I was working, but the English version.
OK, thanks for the detail, @cjackson. I suspected that there may be a specific interaction with Fufulde that is happening here, so this confirmation is helpful.
@richard : This is an interesting discovery that we just came across. Not sure whether this is new, or has existed and we did not see it. It’s in line with this other issue with the shortcut tiles.
We have Khan Academy Early Math content in Fulfulde, English and French on our systems because of the multilingual context in which we have our community learning centers. The English and French content is not curated. We just take it as the entire channel as it is presented on Kolibri Studio. That means it comes with the standard 5 correct answers mastery requirement. We find that to be far too small of a mastery requirement.
In Fulfulde, I have gone through and set the mastery requirement to 100% to push the students to work the content to its fullest.
Because of the above issue with the shortcuts, our learners often find themselves in either English or French Khan content. They work the exercises (particularly the ones with little to no reading), get the 5 question correct and receive their mastery star. That star carries over to the Fulfulde content! From our perspective, this shouldn’t be the case.
There are a number of approaches to a solution that I can think of:
Previously there was one of your studio content workers who helped me by running a script on Khan content that universally set the mastery level to 100% instead of needing to manually go through and set each one. At one time, there was some talk of making that option available to us end users, or to be able to change mastery requirements in a local Kolibri library on a universal basis for selected libraries. If that were possible (particularly doing it at the local level), I would simply apply the 100% mastery to all the content.
Somehow wall off the different language instances of Khan content so that the mastery progress is not shared across them. In some ways from an educational standpoint, it would be good to have the mastery requirements of the different languages separated so that learners can master in their first language, but then practice their math and language skills in a 2nd language they have to learn for their national education system requirements.
Finally, another issue somewhat related to the multilingual community learning centers context we have that I brought up to @RadinaMatic at one time is the need for a way to have a global level of control for different groups of learners. With so much diversity of content available in our libraries, it is overwhelming for new learners and new users. They easily get lost and simply don’t know enough to know they are lost. Rather, they just think they don’t understand and then get stuck. I know there is the feature of setting up classes and limiting learners to only have access to assigned class content. However, in the community learning center context, that isn’t realistic. So it makes me ask the question if there could be a global level that flags users as “debutants” for whom only certain libraries of content are available and seen in the library, while all others have full access after they have mastered the early content and navigating around Kolibri.
I realize this feature is different and in some ways a repetition of the assigned classes approach. However, that is much more appropriate and needed for a school context. A community learning context like ours has a great deal of diversity of learners and content for whom it would be next to impossible to curate and control access. But being able to do that for debutant users would be a huge help in ramping them up to greater success.
For 1, we are currently looking at different options for local curation and management in Kolibri, rather than Studio. Tweaking mastery criteria could be something that we do in this regard, although just letting people add their own resources will be higher priority.
I think 2 is definitely the most desirable from our point of view - but working out how to handle that in a way that preserved existing progress data is very tricky.
For the ‘orienting’ part, one possibility that we have discussed internally is to allow for subsections of a channel to be designated as a ‘course’ that can be assigned en masse (and then sub-folders within that class get assigned as lessons within that course). The overall library access would still be there, but the learner’s homepage would be predominated by the assigned lessons, does that sound workable?
Thanks for your reply. I’m sure these are interesting challenges you face with these various use-case scenarios!
I believe your proposed solution for ‘orienting’ could work. It is certainly a step in the direction I was describing. I also believe getting the continue-learning shortcuts to work correction relative as discussed above will also be a help.
Thanks Chris - I suspect that the relative continue learning shortcuts may be a bug specific to Fufulde and other languages for which there are multiple possible language codes, and so the current frontend implementation is failing to handle those properly.
Sorry for the delay here - I have managed to locally replicate this, it was specific to Fufulde, and other languages where we use a different language code for resources than we do in the interface translations.
I have made a fix which is currently undergoing QA, which we anticipate to be able to release in 0.16.2, hopefully by the 22nd of May.
Apologies for the slight delay here - 0.16.2 is now released with this fix! If the user interface is set to Fufulde, it should now show Fufulde resources prioritized in the continue learning section.
