Tracks, reimagined

Thanks Ryan! I'm already excited for the next release!

Thanks Adam!

Glad to hear it Ken!

Thanks for being a student, Garrett!

You can still do the individual syllabi out of order by going to the Library page and selecting them.

Awesome. Thanks!

Totally agree, at least in principle. I think ideally, we'd allow people to "test out" of tiers. After all, we want to make sure you aren't skipping anything you actually don't know, or perhaps need a refresher on. We take education seriously, and the steps we're taking are really always in the best interest of our students. We definitely think long and hard about this stuff! Thanks for the suggestion, definitely on it but these things take time. We always break things into smaller iterations so we can get new features out to you guys as soon as we can. Because of that, sometimes certain releases can seem incomplete, but know that we have the big picture in mind and we're working towards that with each release!

Alex - Sorry to hear that. Tracks have always been intended as a complete curriculum, chosen in the order they are by our teachers. This is our recommended way to learn that content. However, you still have the option to complete these same courses in the Library, where you will also receive credit for them in your Track, regardless of order.

yes Alex, I agreed with you

Will - that is actually an edge case that probably shouldn't have happened. Ideally would be able to complete your current course. Does that course still show up as in progress in Home? Give me some details so I can investigate your issue! Thanks for being a student!

Yes that course still shows up as progress. I'm using the library to keep working on the section I haven't unlocked yet.

Howdy Will—You should be able to now see any progress you weren't seeing in your Home yesterday. Thanks for the heads up!

Anna - Sorry about that. That said, Tracks are meant to be guided, and were always intended to actually function the way they do now; if you would like you skip around, you can a) still skip around within each tier in a Track or b) complete courses in the Library and you will get credit for them in your Track, regardless of order. We are still working on further features and improvements so stay tuned! Hope that helps!

Thanks Gary, glad you like it!

Sorry guys...I just re-read my post. While I still stand by the message I was trying to get across, I was probably a bit too negative. I should be giving you praise for the hard work, because you have put a lot of thought and effort into the new improvements. I still think the above issue needs a solution, but I do appreciate what you guys have done. Thank you.

In addition to what was said, being locked out increases incentives to complete a track, how?

All good, Thomas. We're glad you're a student and so passionate about the product!. We're never going to please everyone, but we do try to hard to strike the right balance between our vision and our students' feedback as best as we can! As far as your previous post goes, I would however still like to respond to give you a better idea of our vision and process. You might realize that we are probably more on the same page than you think.

We do releases in smaller iterations, and therefore grander projects like Tracks are able to be developed in manageable chunks. This allows us to give our students more regular updates while also avoiding project bloat, scope creep, etc. In the next few iterations of Tracks, we're definitely looking to enable students to "test out" of courses, or tiers of courses. That is a very ambitious project all its own, so we planned for multiple iterations, slowly putting into place the pieces of the puzzle.

I'd like to specifically note that this hierarchical model allows us to group content that we think is best learned together, at a particular time in a particular order (we do allow skipping within a tier). I think it's easy to maybe think of us as just an app company and not one that also employs a full-time staff of experienced teachers that think about how to best plan, structure and teach our curriculum every single day. They're not actors in front of a camera; these guys are for real. They propose and develop (and write their scripts) themselves for each and every course they do. This process alone takes weeks, for each course! TL;DR, we take education seriously.

As a team, we've also come to the realization that we are doing some of our students a disservice by not leveraging our collective knowledge and experience to develop better systems and conveying more structure. Because of this, over the past several months, we've transitioned Adventures into Tracks and slowly iterated them to align with our overall vision of guided learning. The Library has always been the destination for a la carte content consumption, and that hasn't changed. We feel strongly that our students should definitely be able to skip certain content eventually, but only if they're truly qualified to do so. Learning in bits and pieces is certainly encouraged for continuing education, but we rather passionately believe that a fun yet structured curriculum is the key to actually teaching our students better, quicker and with fewer frustrations. We've left a lot of beginners behind or just confused and frustrated by not offering them a more guided, on-rails way to learn at Treehouse.

Of course, we also don't want to leave students behind who absolutely prefer to march to the beat of their own drum. For now, students that use Tracks as a general guide rather than a strict curriculum can easily find the locked courses they want in the Library, and even still get credit for them in their Track upon completion. We think that's a pretty reasonable tradeoff in the medium term, until we can implement a more frictionless solution such as testing out. At the very least, do know that we are absolutely aware of and thinking about all of these issues pretty much... always! :)

Again, I'm so stoked that you are enjoying Treehouse. It really means a lot to us when we do see positive feedback, and I personally really even appreciate the negative as long as it's constructive. Thanks again, I hope that provided some insight!

Cheers!

Pierre Fatal - I would genuinely love to hear what might actually incentivize you to complete a track! Always open to feedback!

I would focus on enhancing the actual learning experience with better time management tools and things like cheat sheets.

@Pierre -- The cheat sheet you mentioned is a really good idea. Like you, I've been making my own cheat sheet in Workflowy which really comes in handy when I try to implement everything I've learned.

Attributes, selectors, and elements, etc. can be difficult to remember even though I fundamentally understand how to use them.

Not sure if Treehouse-made notes would be beneficial (since the act of note-taking increases memorization), but it's definitely something they could consider.

Thanks so much Calvin! We're stoked you liked it!

Christina - glad you are enjoying the release, minus the locking :P

It will all make sense in time, I so promise!

Thomas, please see my very lengthy post above. Thanks for your feedback, and we're already thinking about this :)

Thanks for the information. It does look like a lot of thought went into this update and I look forward to seeing where things go in the future.

All good ideas, Thomas, and some are definitely ideas we have floated around. We'll come up with an elegant solution, I promise. Thanks for the praise, I'll be sure to pass it on!

Also, stay in your Track. If you want to take a course further ahead in the track that is in a locked tier, then just take that course in the Library. We store all of your progress, so that's why if you started completing courses in the Library before you started a Track, you might see random courses or stages filled in as complete inside of your Track.

In short, take the course in the Library (starting it will pin it to your Home automatically) and it will be marked as complete in your Track when you're done. The only "hassle" is really just having to browse/search for it in the Library and clicking a button to start it. You'll then be able to keep tabs on your Track and whatever courses you want to, and work on them simultaneously. Flexible!

Like I said, we're working on a more elegant solution (which has always been part of the plan), but because simply taking the course in the Library isn't a huge barrier, we decided this iteration on its own provided enough value for both us and our students. Had we wrapped the two projects into one iteration, the scope would have been far too large for one release. We always have to make compromises when planning this stuff; striking the right balance is hard!

All I can really say beyond that is, more to come, folks! :)

Oh man, if accurate that sounds like a bug! Definitely not how we designed it, but we do break things :)

We'll check it out!

Howdy Thomas Quayle — we fixed this today. Now if you're working on a course that's currently locked in your Track, it will appear in Home below the Track information. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for your feedback, Zerui. Please see the update I posted!

Zerui — Now if you're working on a course that's currently locked in your Track, it will appear in Home below the Track information. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks Holger!

Thanks for your feedback Alex. Please read the update I posted last night :)

Thanks for the feedback, David! Our sanity is in fact in check, and we are working on some solutions to accommodate all our students. In the meantime, we've decided to allow access to all courses from inside a Track again. In the future, Tracks will be more understandably differentiated from the Library as we continue to iterate, but we definitely admit we may have jumped the gun a bit on the locking portion of this larger vision for Tracks. We hope you stick with us though, as we are most definitely listening! :)

Anna - that sounds like normal behavior, no? Maybe I am misunderstanding you.

Are you wanting to be able to access courses you're doing off-Track from within your Track?

Not a problem! As far as your question goes though, we are not going to be showing active progress of off-Track courses within your Track. Tracks are not playlists, nor is it a dashboard for your current active courses (that would be Home). Hope that makes sense. We'll also be rolling out an "Add to Home" functionality for courses today so you can pin them to your Home without having to actually start them, which should help people that want to start their own mini queues. Theoretically, you could add all the courses in a Track to your Home so you can do all that content off-Track. We'll probably expand this functionality, but we wanted to roll something out quickly for you guys.

I just want to remind people that Tracks are a guided curriculum. We really do not encourage people to skip around if you're on a Track.

Ok. I understand either track, home or playlist serve for different purpose and you don't want to mess them up. I guess I can just wait for the new release. Thanks for the quick reply anyway.

Oddur Sigurdsson -

You are spot on.

For people how have completed prerequisite courses before that course was retired, should get credit for that and have the relevant section of their track unlocked.

Daniel Lewis - What say you, for people who the combination of the Build a Basic Website course retired combined with the Track Re-design combined to lock them.

Nancy,

I have the same issue as you (see above). I might be able to shed some light on this:

• The original course you took (Smells like Bakin') was retired last week and has been replaced by a more in-depth course. In essence, it gives a longer introduction which lowers the technical threshold for beginners. It also makes use of Workspaces.
• Your points and badges for the old course still exist in your profile. You should be able to see them under 'View Profile' when you click your icon in the top right.
• The tracks feature on Treehouse is linear meaning that you must complete your projects in order if you're going to follow the track.

In other words, you still get credit global credit (Treehouse), but your local credit (i.e. progress toward your track) has been revoked. Treehouse wants you to retake the course.

As an override, you can click on the course name in the tracks and clicked the grayed out button (either 'Resume Course' or 'View Course' depending on if you've started it). By doing this you can keep going, ignoring the alerts. You can also manually continue on with any course through the library.

These changes have been a let down to me and I hope this gets addressed soon. But my advice to you is just to keep on churning with the track you are on by using the library - all of that credit gets applied to your track in the end anyway.

I think it's just run time of the videos not including pausing for notetaking/coding or the time required to complete quizzes and code challenges.

Rory Costello Good question. Since everyone works at their own pace, it's hard to factor things like note taking and off-site practice time into global time estimates. We've got a basic algorithm that looks at average time-to-completion for each stage (actual data from past students) and then we add those up to get totals for tracks.