Students were very frustrated this semester!
cesine opened this issue · comments
Having heard much positive about the app over the past few years, I decided we would try it as a database in our field methods course this year. There are 21 students in the class. The students are divided into small groups, and each group worked on its own database.
We encountered a number of problems that have led many of the students to decide that the app is not adequate for our purposes. Having been frustrated by these problems, we thought that we should pass the information on to you to give you an idea of the challenges that people in the class faced, leading most of them to turn to other alternatives for organizing their data.
We can divide these problems into different types.
Some people had difficulty logging in, despite using the correct password. #1691
Several people had difficulty loading – either the log in page did not load or it was possible to log in but the data home screen did not load. #1914
It was sometimes difficult to load the data home screen. Refreshing sometimes helped, but sometimes the website would freeze. #1914
When data was entered, the software sometimes jumped from entry to entry, without allowing a return to the entry the person wanted to work on.
People encountered major problems in saving data. The data is supposed to be saved automatically every five minutes. People would enter data and save it, receiving verification that it was saved, and they could re-access it at that point. However, after quitting and re-entering the program, the data was no longer present. On other occasions, a single entry was saved more than one time.
Searches were also problematic. The most frequently mentioned problem is that no one was able to figure out how to search in a single field. Thus, a search for a character or a sequence would look in all field, including the English gloss. #76
Some people found that they could search within a session but not over the whole database. Some had problems with the search recognizing characters such as β. #1985
In addition, people mentioned that there was not a word class field. #1813
While the autogloss function is a plus to the app in some ways, it did not always give the gloss that was needed. While this problem could be corrected, the database continued to use the previous (wrong) autogloss. #2019
It was difficult to do phonological searches – for instance, is there a sound that is found only between vowels. It was necessary to search in all specific environments. #975
Several students ended up working with other software to do their searches.
For some who figured out how to enter the data, they found that as the database got large, it also got very slow. #1914
Some of the symbols show up in odd ways (e.g., voiced palatal stop).
We hope that this is of use to you as you continue to improve the app. The idea of it is great – it is easy to learn to use (but maybe not so easy as it initially seems, since many people encountered difficulties with it, while others figured it out after some work). However, the problems in actual use led to a huge degree of frustration on the part of people in the class.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks so much for taking the time to send this to us! Its important to us to hear both the good and the frustrating. We have created an issue #2095 and noted the known solutions to the student's problems, and added TODOs for the ones that we think are bugs.
Do you know why none of the students used the "Contact Us" button during the semester? It would have been much less frustrating for them to not feel like they were plodding away in the dark. We usually send out a welcome email to instructors with additional info and instructions for customizing the corpus but we didn't hear that you were using the app so we didn't include you in the instructors email. I will forward you a copy now although its a bit too late.
Thank you, cesine. I think that what happened is that they did not really get started until just before an assignment that required use of the database was due, and then they discovered these problems, so I just revised what the assignment was, given the timing.
And I apologize if I should have let you know that we were using it - I did not get a clear message about that from the website, and did not realize that from the presentations that I had heard (awhile ago) about it.
I appreciate your contacting me.
@hisakonog the picture of our uptime clearly communicates the change when we switched hosting :(
Since we applied the patch the hosting company provided, we have 99% uptime
