Can students study effectively on mobile? In this video interview made early last year, Adrian Raper argued that they could. Now that four of Clarity’s programs are mobile-friendly, we are able to examine that claim in more detail. It’s certainly clear that students like to learn on their phones as usage has just about doubled. There’s also evidence that the learning, or at least, the outcomes, aren’t very different.
So, now that we have converted Study Skills Success, Tense Buster, Dynamic Placement Test and Road to IELTS, the big push this year is to upgrade the remaining programs to HTML5 format. Here are the five principle development targets you can look forward to.
- Practical Writing upgrade. Practical Writing is only two years old, so there will be only minor content updates. Work on converting the delivery to the new mobile-friendly platform is already underway. Release date: April 2019
- Active Reading. This program is a little more elderly. In addition to the technical upgrades, we will re-shoot the videos, update some content, add fresh content and more closely align the levels with the CEFR. Release date: September 2019
- Dynamic Placement Test (DPT) standard-setting. The test items in the Dynamic Placement Test are validated by telc, the content provider. Click here for details. We are going to additionally run a two-day standard-setting session where each question will be scrutinised by experts from around the world. This will take place in Hong Kong in early May. Let us know if you’d like to join us.
- The DPT Admin Panel is easy to use, but it needs to be more flexible. Setting up a test for a single student is clumsy; you can’t change the end time for a test after it has started; and there are plenty of other niggles. We are completely redesigning the Admin Panel to eliminate these problems, and will release the new version in June.
- Finally, Results Manager suffers from some of the same problems as the Admin Panel. We will build a new version using the same underlying technology for both tools, and will release it at the end of the year.
We base our design decisions on feedback from users and by looking at (anonymised) user behaviour within the programs. We are always looking for feedback, criticism and new insights that will make our programs more effective for you, the user.
Meanwhile, best wishes for a happy 2019 from all of us at ClarityEnglish.
