Monassis release 1.1.1

As mentioned in the previous post, it's consolidation time and this release is mostly about scaling up to handle more users, streamlining a few processes and fixing bugs and user interface problems.

Highlights:

• We're now running four copies rather than one copy of the Monassis server, to handle increased traffic. A load balancer monitors and distributes incoming requests to the different servers.
• Streamlined handling of users' error reports, meaning that you'll get a response from our team much more quickly than before.
• Simple profiling of different types of requests, to find ones that are taking too long to compute, so that we can optimize them.
• Automatic processing of school spreadsheets for setting up class lists.

User interface tweaks:

• We've been having trouble with some images not showing up on lower end mobile phones. We're now using a different technical mechanism for displaying images, so this problem should disappear.
• Made teacher dashboard plots scrollable for teachers with large numbers of learners in their classes.
• Changed the default time filter range on the teacher dashboard to include today, even though it's only a partial day. It seems that teachers like to monitor their learners as they are practising in real time.

 

Monassis release 1.1 (MVP)

This release constitutes what we consider the minimum viable product for use by individual learners or by teachers in the classroom. The practice service has been live since April 2012 (with a total of about 4,000 users completing about 64,000 questions since then!), but the following new features make it a must-have for the discerning teacher and the keen student.

• A teachers' dashboard that shows the engagement and performance of the learners in their classes. If you're interested in how we use analytics to inform teachers where their students are succeeding or struggling, have a look at the teacher dashboard tour.
• A probabilistic model of users' mastery of questions, sections, chapters and subjects allows the practice service to automatically adjust the difficulty of questions being presented to the user, based on their level of mastery.
  (If you're a Bayesian inference geek: The generative model is a hierarchical Gaussian prior over mastery scores with a binomial likelihood function and a logistic link function between the prior and likelihood. Inference is done with a fully factored variational approximation.)
• We now organise exercises using a section hierarchy rather than tags, allowing for better navigation and filtering from the teachers' and learners' dashboards. This also allows teachers and learners to drill down and select questions at the section rather than the chapter level.
• Navigation on mobile phones is functional. The www interface is still much prettier, but we're working on making mobi better every day. Making the practice service as accessible as possible over mobile phones is a huge priority for us since more than two thirds of our traffic comes from mobile devices. See our 2012 readership report for more information.
• Better Postgresql database migration for altering table structure.
• And, as always, some bugfixes.

As you can see, it's been a busy few weeks! There is still lots of cool new functionality coming this year, so watch this space. For the next few weeks, I'm planning on consolidating the code base a bit and on working on caching strategies so that we can scale to tens of thousands of users.

Monassis release 1.0.9

The first release for a while, mostly because we've madly been writing free textbooks over at Siyavula. Now that the dust has settled, I'm back onto Monassis development and the first order of business was to switch to a new database server. We've been using SQLite until now, which has been holding up really well with about 3700 users, but it won't scale for the future, so we're moving to PostgreSQL.

Changes:

• Migrated to PostgreSQL.
• Much improved ASCIIsvg to PNG pipeline. The latest figures are beautiful!
• Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Grades 10 and 12 are complete.
• Bugfixes and unit tests.

Over the course of the next month we're getting ready for the start of the 2013 school year. This means completing alignment of Grade 11 exercises to the new curriculum and finalising a few additional features for learners and teachers. Expect the next release in about 4 weeks!

Monassis release 1.0.8 (codename: nostalgia)

I just noticed that it's 1 year ago to the day that the first version of Monassis went live. It was version 0.1, which had 6 templates and supported only numeric and multiple choice responses. We now have more than 650 templates and can interpret chemical compounds, equations and spectroscopic notation, multiple choice, coordinates, mathematical expressions, equations and inequalities, factorised and expanded polynomials, proper fractions, decimal numbers, intervals and lists!

The main purpose of the v0.1 release was to have Grant Hillebrand's class try out the system and give some feedback on how to improve it. The practice service has come a long way since then thanks to a great templating team and some very strong support and great feedback from school teachers and learners.

To celebrate the occasion there's a small release going out today. (Ok, that's not entirely causal. I was actually preparing this release and then noticed that v0.1 went out on 28 September 2011.)

In this release:

• Implemented equation responses
• Better error reporting.
• Support for logarithms with non-default base using underscore notation.
  Some more prep for releasing on mobile and Mxit.

Monassis release 1.0.7

This is a minor release and mostly a collection of fixes (listed below). The exciting bit is that some of the modifications are in preparation for releasing the practice service over mobile phones... but, you'll have to wait a few more weeks for detailed news on that front.

• New features:
• Each chapter in dashboard is now a link, filtering on that chapter only
• Implemented coordinate response type
• Fixes:
• Minor fixes to ASCIIsvg to PNG converter (Thanks Leen!)
• Do not show "future chapters" section on dashboard when there are no more future chapters. (We finally need this since the Physical Sciences Grade 12 book has been fully templated!)
• Fixed list response type so that it can have sub-types that use semi-colons
• Implemented separate sessions for each book. You can now practice maths and science simultaneously without confusing the practice service.
• Mobi prep:
• Check for Mxit in request headers
• Added spans and divs around dynamic elements in dashboard and question views
• Implemented per-book access control

Monassis release 1.0.6

Version 1.0.6 of the intelligent practice service went live late yesterday! This release is mostly a collection of fixes.

The major fix is that ASCIIsvg images are now being converted to PNG images on the server side. Some browsers (notably IE and Chrome under Windows) do not support SVG images natively. Since most of our clients are Windows users, this was a bit of a problem. The cool thing is that images are still created using the ASCIIsvg format, making it possible to template and randomize them.

The ASCIIsvg to SVG code was created by Leen Remmelzwaal here at Siyavula and is available under the GPL here. The new code base has an improved version of the original Javascript library (cleaned up and with some additional functionality) for client-side conversion and a new Python library for server-side conversion.

A whole bunch of chapters have also been released in the mean time. We are very close to finishing up all of Grade 12 Mathematics and Physical Sciences and not too far off from finishing Grade 10 too.

Monassis release 1.0.5

The next release (version 1.0.5) of the practice server went live today.

The most notable new features are

• a "Try this question again" button, for when you got a question wrong, read the feedback in the worked solution and want to give it another try with a new random set of numbers.
• 8 new chapters to practise including
• Mathematics Grade 10, Finance and growth
• Mathematics Grade 10, Trigonometry
• Mathematics Grade 11, Hyperbolic functions and graphs
• Physical Sciences Grade 10, Electric circuits
• Physical Sciences Grade 10, Quantitative aspects of chemical change
• Physical Sciences Grade 11, Quantitative aspects of chemical change
• Physical Sciences Grade 12, The chemical industry
• Physical Sciences Grade 12, Electromagnetic radiation
• Corrections to existing templates, based on comments from our users. The "Report a problem" button is really working and we're able to iron out any remaining problems within 24 hours of a report. Whoever reported the problem gets a personal thank-you note and the other users never even know that there was a problem!
  

Thanks again to the team of technical content editors for pushing out templates at an alarming rate and welcome to Eric Gulbis who joined us on the 18th!

(P.S. For those who are paying attention: version 1.0.4 was a minor bug-fix release.)