November 2024 survey results

First of all, thank you to everyone who responded to the November survey! This time was the largest number of responses to a survey yet, and I got a lot of valuable feedback. This is going to be a long post, so get ready.

First, here are the general stats. I’m rounding the percentages and leaving off the least picked answers, so they might not add up to 100%.

User home country: USA (40%), The Philippines (15%), Canada (14%), The UK (11%), Australia (5%), South Africa (5%), New Zealand (3%), and quite a few other countries with one person.

Users found out about ALTopedia through: Co-workers/friends (48%), a web search (32%), Englipedia (8%), Conferences (6%), Social media (5%).

Users visit ALTopedia: Several times per week (50%), Every day (29%), Once per week (15%), and the remainder less often than that.

Choice of (theoretical) pet: Totoro (65%), a dinosaur (20%), an elephant (15%). I think Totoro would be pretty quiet and good-natured, but I wonder about his food bill.

Users teach at: Junior High (73%), Elementary (63%), High School (18%), Pre-kindergarten/Kindergarten (12%), Eikaiwa/Adult lessons (11%), University (2%)

Users’ satisfaction level with ALTopedia, on a scale of 1 (low) to 7 (high): 6 (44%), 7 (31%), 5 (22%), and a handful of people who chose 3 or 4.

Features that users would like ALTopedia to focus on in 2025: Forums (34%), Improving the Lesson Tracker (33%), More/stricter activity curation (26%), More textbooks (25%), UI Improvements (25%), Videos/Podcasts (18%), A Discord server (14%), Offline meetups (10%), A more convenient payment system (8%)

There were also quite a lot of comments that applied to these and other topics. To address these:

Forums

The most requested feature by far was for forums. What I took away from the wide support for this idea is that a lot of users feel like they’d like to connect with other teachers and discuss their classes and develop ideas.

The level of support was very clear, so I’ll start planning to build the feature soon. I’ll write a lot more about forums in a dedicated post later, but I want to design them in a way that hopefully will emphasize the positive aspects of the format while minimizing the downsides. Both the technical side and the administration/moderation side are going to be formidable undertakings.

It would be quicker to just make a subreddit or set up a 2000s-era phpBB forum on some external service, but I think in order to make it work, it will need to be part of the site internally. There needs to be a connection between people’s account history and their forum presence. If anyone can sign up and post immediately, I think that it would be vulnerable to external brigading and spam bots. To avoid that I’m thinking of charging some small fee for access, but it’s still in the early planning stages.

Fixing Tag Search

A lot of people said that the Tag Search system was frustrating to use. It was originally developed by Colin, but a lot of the tech on the site has changed out from under it after he made it. It used to work a lot better before that. It’s kind of surprising that it even works at all, to be honest with you. In any case, it needs to be heavily revised so it’s more intuitive and easy to use. It’s high on my list of things to work on.

Curation

I got a ton of feedback that there are a lot of activities that are unhelpful or just broken. Since we just crested 5000 activities recently, I think we can afford to be choosier. I think there’s going to need to be some mechanism by which if an activity is really unlikely to be useful to anyone, it can be either de-emphasized when searching or even automatically removed if it’s egregious enough.

But I want to be really careful about how we go about this. I don’t want the site to turn into Wikipedia where there’s this huge group of bureaucrats that spend all of their time smashing anything and anybody that they don’t like. The site needs to be accessible and welcoming to new people with new ideas. We also have to be prudent about the threshold for when an activity is deemed low-quality. If it’s just X number of votes, then it’s going to be used for mass vandalism the moment anyone figures that out. If it’s a chosen council of people who make the decisions, the group becomes a target for anyone who falls afoul of them.

I made the Tag Voting system to try to help with this, but so far it hasn’t seen a lot of use. I’ll try making the votes visible by default when you look at an activity page. I’ll start evaluating other systems to help with curation, but it’s going to be a long-term goal and not something that can be developed quickly.

Missing Textbooks - I know there are a lot of people who are still missing the textbooks in use in their classes. I made the Textbook Manager system to allow users to make the listings themselves, since I don’t have the time or means to track down the wide variety of textbooks that are used across Japan. I’ll try and make this system more visible.

Email comment notifications - A lot of people mentioned that they would like to be able to respond to comments on their activities when they come in. Subscribers get a ticker on their dashboard that shows these comments, but maybe it’s time to bring this functionality to everyone on the site. I don’t want the site to be something that’s constantly pinging you all the time and trying to get you to spend all day on it, so my current thought is that it might be a daily digest type of email, and that you’ll need to opt in to receive email notifications. It’s on my development list now, but it might take lower priority than some of the other items on the list.

Image previews of attachments - This has come up in previous surveys and other methods of feedback. This is something that’s technically possible, but different file formats are easier to generate thumbnails for than others. It’s going to increase the load on the server, but hopefully not too much.

AI art in activities - In this survey and several other messages I’ve received lately, I’ve heard from some people who are concerned about activities that incorporate AI-generated artwork. The thing about creating rules about AI art is that we would have to define it first. It’s easy to identify the goofy mutant clipart with hideous color schemes, but the thing about AI art is that you don’t notice the good output. I don’t know how realistic it would be to require every user to attest to the origin of every image in their activity. But I get the concern that it’s easier to generate something using LLMs and image generators than it is to compose something thoughtful and useful. I’m just not sure that a ban can be effective or enforceable.

UI Improvements/Improving the Lesson Tracker - Unfortunately I made these options too vague. The UI certainly needs a lot of refinement and polishing across the different systems and pages. If I had an infinite amount of time or the budget to hire people, I’d love to build a more modern component-based UI, but maybe that would mean putting too many other things on the shelf for too long. I’ll try and fix the more egregious issues when I see them, and work slowly towards improving the general look and feel.

Large files - A lot of people found the 40 megabyte file limit off-putting. I don’t like imposing it, but it’s a matter of bandwidth costs. The more accessible huge files are, the more people download them, and the higher the bandwidth bill is every month. Without a way to offset these costs, the site will cost more to run than it brings in, and I can’t keep that up forever.

Separating activities more clearly by ES/JHS or grade level - I hear from a lot of people who want the ability to filter activities by specific grade level. What’s stopped me from doing that in the past is that some materials and topics are covered in different ways at different grade levels. I remember when I was adding the first round of JHS textbooks, there were grammar points that different textbooks covered in either 2nd grade or 3rd grade. I’ve seen school districts that start English earlier in Elementary than other districts, so what might be an ES 4th grade lesson in one district might be 5th or 6th in another. But maybe there are some lessons that are unambiguously attached to one specific grade level. What’s your experience?

I’ve got quite a lot on my plate for 2025, but I’ll start with Tag Search and the Forums. A lot of people told me that the site was extremely helpful for them, so I’m always grateful to hear that. See you soon for the 2024 wrap-up post!