Is there a way to change what % of my daily goal is review? I don't really want to use FC for in class studying as much as it wants me to. My goal this year was to use FC more as a review rather than parallel study method. Also, is there a way to intersperse the reviews throughout the daily goal cards? So far it seems like they come at the end, and I'm having trouble getting to them. I guess I could do filters for a review deck in "Study Something Specific", but it bothers me that it doesn't take from my card total.
Im frustrated with a lot of things overall like the inability to unmark stuff. I marked neoplasia because thats what I just did in path but it cover about 10x more. The FC neoplasia section goes way into stuff that we will cover more specifically in an organ system later, but I don't want to make it "past" because some of the cards are relevant and I don't want all those cards I don't know clogging up my review. I don't want to use FC to study ahead because I think that is super inefficient. Same thing with endocrine physiology. It contains a TON of path that we haven't gotten to in my schools curriculum. I marked it as past and the only reviews I'm getting are things that aren't really reviews. If I just had the flexibility of unmarking things...
Apologies for the radio silence on my end. I've been on the road making school visits, and then I had to move into a new apartment as soon as I got back. The worst. Now that I'm back among the living, let me shed some light on a few of your questions/concerns:
First, regarding the inability to unmark: This was the hardest decision I made when building the new product experience, and - candidly - it was easily the biggest mistake. (I don't mind admitting this.) I still believe the vision behind it is correct (I'll explain some of that in a bit), but it has become clear that many existing Firecracker Legacy and Beta users are far too accustomed to the previous flagging behavior to be able to completely abandon it comfortably. As such,
we are adding the ability to unmark back into Firecracker MD and Firecracker DO; this will be available by
8/27 (next Thursday) at the latest. (Just as an aside: we are adding updates and enhancements every Thursday for the next few months. We have a tentative schedule for these updates, but things can be moved in response to the requests of our members. If you want something, just let me know and I can work at getting it in there
[email protected].) That said, I'd like to explain why I decided to launch without unmarking.
When we analyzed the past flagging behavior of users in Legacy and Beta, the rampant flagging/unflagging that occurred seriously worried me. Flagging in the older systems essentially meant 'see/don't see'. The problem with this is that - in terms of longterm test prep - you should never just not see any of the content you've learned in the past. The goal of adaptive, spaced repetition learning platforms like Firecracker is to assist you in curating learned material over time, and then presenting you with that past learned content again at the exact moment before you forget it, ensuring that you keep it fresh during your entire length of study. With the past flagging behavior, members could basically turn off the content they had learned, meaning we could never present it to them again to ensure they didn't forget it. That is a glaring problem as it significantly undermines the promise of our algorithm and the intelligent tutor it drives.
As such, I believed it was better to try to take a stronger hand in directing members to use marking in the appropriate long-term manner: namely, thinking of marking as signifying that content has been learned. And since you cannot simply unlearn something, it made sense to not allow you to unmark, as well. (This is a highly reductionist explanation of our considerations, but you get the point.) The goal of any good product UX is always to direct users towards the best behavior
for them. This typically occurs through education and a certain degree of hand holding/trust building. Unfortunately, blocking unmarking in fact ended up being an overly aggressive way of educating users by simply forcing them into the behavior that we believed was best for them. It was a mistake, but I hope now you can see it as an honest one. (I'll stop droning on here, but if you're interested in knowing more, just let me know. I'm down to be uncomfortably transparent.)
But on to greener pastures! By the end of next week,
we are adding two core features that will remedy 95% of all concerns I've received since we launched:
- The ability to unmark content. (When you go to unmark, I'll warn you that you should only unmark if you either incorrectly marked something or realized you haven't learned it yet. However, you can dismiss that warning and unmark anyway.)
- The ability to reset your study plan. (Yep. It seems many students either rushed through it the first time or were a bit too... aggressive... regarding their lofty goals. We are actually aiming on adding this today, but you know how software is...)
Hope that helps, but let me know if I missed something. Cheers!
