Thank you for your detailed response to my review. It really looks like you are trying hard to address these issues.

I am looking forward to seeing the revamped website in June.

Cheers,
Enki

Steven Walsh

Thank you so much for blogging about Curriki. I’m sorry that you didn’t become a member – because you are the kind of member we need! It’s apparent that you have thought about the issues we face in making our site easy to use. We are trying hard to give our audience of educators — who come to Curriki from a very diverse base in terms of comfort level with our technologies — the advantages in collaboration and community that a wiki provides while smoothing their learning curve to make sure it’s easy for them to navigate and find good content and also powerful enough to organize curricular materials that are produced by many different members in a variety of formats. Clearly, we are not there yet, but all big ideas take some time to finesse and get right.

The issues you wrote about are exactly the kinds of issues that the small but dedicated Curriki team grapples with, and exactly what we’re addressing in our relaunch of the site, currently scheduled for late June. It’s true that the home page, which has developed rather organically, is not organized as well as it should be. I don’t really agree that it’s all self promotion. Most of the content on the home page is designed to feature member content because we are trying to promote the fabulous material that people are submitting. We do have Curriki news on the site, but again, we try to feature items that might be interesting to the Curriki community. However, as I said above, we are relaunching the site in June and this release is entirely dedicated to making the site easier to use. (Internally, we’re actually calling it our Ease of Use relaunch). One of the Ease of Use changes is a new home page which immediately focuses users on our three main features: Find, Contribute and Connect. We will still feature some member content and some partner content, but the page will have a cleaner look and feel, and direct people to do the things they have come to the site to do. Anyone who is interested in getting a sneak preview of the new home page can email me at aschreiber@curriki.org and I’m happy to send a copy for review.

We are also implementing other changes in our June relaunch (there will be a second series of changes coming in September as well). Search, which as you noted is too slow, is being reviewed to enhance performance and speed. Some of the speed issues are caused by filtering for rights which we can’t do much about, but we are looking for solutions. It will also be much easier to add content on the wiki through simple lesson plan and blank wiki forms. We’re also adding tutorials and better help features to guide people through the site. As you noted, you didn’t see the edit feature on the documents because you were not logged in as a member, however, all documents made in the wiki can be edited. We do however allow our members to upload other file types as attachments, which are not as easy to edit or collaborate on. Though we try to encourage everyone to submit material directly in the wiki, in all its collaborative glory, we don’t want the wiki to be a barrier to teachers who might just want to share something great with the rest of the world.

Finally, though you didn’t wait for the search to complete, we do have lots and lots of great content. We have been working with a number of partners who have donated whole courses, multimedia curricula, lesson plans and other great resources. We also now have a huge number of member contributions — more every day. Presently on the site we have over 12,000 learning resources and this number will grow dramatically by the summer. And the content is reviewed by master teachers, so it’s really an amazing, free resource for educators and students, which, in the end, is our most important goal.

We really do appreciate your comments. Though you found issues with the site usability, architecture and performance, we hope that most of those issues will be addressed in the coming months. We’d be very happy to include you in our usability review group, “Friends of Curriki”. It’s a diverse, passionate group of individuals that we call on informally from time to time. If you’d like to be one of our reviewers, please let me know. Thanks again for your comments and we hope you decide to become part of the Curriki community.

Anne Schreiber
Chief Academic Officer
Curriki.org
aschreiber@curriki.org