Improvements to the way the course goes.

Hi fellow Treehousers,

I just wanted to point out and suggest a few things for making treehouse even better for those learning to program.

First off, my background is in education (teaching)so I think my criticisms and suggests have some validity to begin with. Let's begin.

1. Wording of questions are often too simple (too easy) or too indirect (using language that doesn't help the user answer the true question)

How can you expect users to reword the question when they don't understand it in the first place? I suggest you have someone work with you guys on improving the way you ask you questions: many books on questioning to help people learn.

1. Tasks in challenges are too mundane or repetitive. There is some value in repeating tasks but it should be done in a variety of situations.

I suggest Challenges need to be real life,workspaces based that demand the learner to use their own methods of completing challenges. This would need to be looked through by an end user: preferably an actual programmer or possibly another student. Then they can be graded accordingly. This also gives the students an opportunity to troubleshoot bugs and improve their own coding skills.

In addition tasks should be relative to the learners objectives. By giving the learner more than one way to use the same code it engages them with the learning more. ie. using ul to create navigation or interactive elements on the page like accordian content.

1. Some videos seem redundant or unnecessary. In some cases, two things could be easily learned in the same activity. In other cases there are times when there is just too much to learn in one video.

A person should be able to get done 1 lesson on a specific topic: ie. css transitions, within 25-45 mins with videos not being much more than 3-5 minutes.

1. Forum should specify every question to every inquiry related to the lesson you are learning instead of having to search through a mountain of questions that may not be related to yours. maybe have a button for quick inquiry to this question that tags that exact page to questions related to it.

Okay, I'm done...for now.

I hope this has been useful for the treehouse team and if anyone has anything else to add please post.

I know the guys at treehouse have put a lot of work into this site and got a great start. Let's continue to help improve this product for new learners and make the experience even better.

Var