One Millionth Lesson Giveaway

Scholaric is nearing one million planned lessons for homeschoolers:

To celebrate, I'm giving away one year free subscription to Scholaric.

To enter, you must:

  • Create a lesson on the day Scholaric hits 1,000,000 lessons - you don't have to create the actual 1,000,000th lesson.  No matter how many lessons you create, this gives you one entry.

Note that you can be an exiting customer, or sign up for a new trial.  No purchase is necessary.

To get up to two additional entries, you can:

  • Between now and the 1,000,000th day, promote giveaway on Twitter with this tweet and add a comment below.
  • Between now and the 1,000,000th day, promote on Facebook with this update (coming soon) and add a comment below.

Winner will be picked at random, and any funny business will get you disqualified.  My decision is final of course.

Happy Planning, and thanks for the help in getting to a million!

Course Menu Update for Grading

The coming release of group-weighted grading will have an updated course menu - adding the ability to change the grade type.  Here you can see the additional grade types:

Previously, the only place you could change a grade type was in the report card, which only was available if there were completed lessons.

Happy Planning

Scholaric 2012 in Review

The Good
The Bad
  • Two of the three major development efforts (transcripts and group-weighted grading) did not get released.
  • More videos were a goal, and I created a total of 1 new video.
  • Fell short of my goal of 1,000,000 lessons planned.
  • Marketing page still needs to be redone.
The Ugly
  • Major outage of Scholaric (along with half the internet) - part of an Amazon web services outage.
  • Blog became slow to process to new posts, and went completely down for a few days.
  • Payment system was unavailable for 2 days in December.
I am excited about the coming year - there are so many ways in which Scholaric can and will be better, and I can't wait to get them to you.

Happy Planning

Where do Scholaric Users Come From (in 2012)?

Here is a map of U.S. usage in 2012 (darker = more usage):

 

The top states being:

  • Missouri (yay)
  • North Carolina
  • Texas
  • Florida
  • Washington
  • California
  • Arkansas
  • Illinois
  • Virginia
  • Georgia

And the top cities (by metro area):

  • St. Louis, MO (yay)
  • Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX
  • Portland, OR
  • Washington DC
  • Greensboro/High Point/Winston Salem, NC
  • New York, NY
  • Raleigh-Durham, NC
  • Atlanta, GA
  • Ft. Meyers, FL
  • Kansas City, MO

So why isn't your state/town listed here?  Tell your friends about Scholaric, and try to unseat the champion!

Thanks for a great 2012, and Happy Planning

Scholaric Maintenance Tonight

I will need to take down Scholaric tonight for some maintenance.

There is a critical Security in the software Scholaric is built upon.  Ordinarily, releases do not make Scholaric unavailable, but this time, it must.  I apologize for the down time during this busy planning season, but this is a critical patch.

I expect this to start at approximately 9:00 PM Central Time, and last less than an hour.

Enumerated Sequences

Sometimes you have a sequence of lessons which don't fit any regular pattern.

Our Jacob's Algebra textbook is divided into chapters, each of which are divided into a different number of lessons.  Chapter 1 has 9 lessons, chapter 2 has 6 lessons, chapter 3 has 7 lessons, chapter 4 has 5 lessons, chapter 5 has 8 lessons, and so on.

Of course, you could use nested sequences to express two different incrementing ranges.  But in this case, its not quite right.  The second (inner) sequence has a different range, depending on the first (outer) value, and you'd have to do a great deal of editing and bumping after creation.

You could also create the lessons one chapter at a time.  That would work, but is not the user experience I am looking for.

Enumerated Sequences

Enumerated sequences express explicitly the start and end values to use in multiple ranges.  They are designed for the case above, where there are different values in each range.

You can express an enumeration by following your range with a comma ',' followed by another range, (which can be followed by another comma, and another range...)


The result is the series that we want, all in one swift click:

Chapter 1 Lesson 1
Chapter 1 Lesson 2
Chapter 1 Lesson 3
Chapter 1 Lesson 4
Chapter 1 Lesson 5
Chapter 1 Lesson 6
Chapter 1 Lesson 7
Chapter 1 Lesson 8
Chapter 1 Lesson 9
Chapter 2 Lesson 1
Chapter 2 Lesson 2
Chapter 2 Lesson 3
Chapter 2 Lesson 4
Chapter 2 Lesson 5
Chapter 2 Lesson 6
Chapter 3 Lesson 1
Chapter 3 Lesson 2
Chapter 3 Lesson 3
Chapter 3 Lesson 4
Chapter 3 Lesson 5
Chapter 3 Lesson 6
Chapter 3 Lesson 7

Chapter 4 Lesson 1
Chapter 4 Lesson 2
Chapter 4 Lesson 3
Chapter 4 Lesson 4
Chapter 4 Lesson 5

Chapter 5 Lesson 1
Chapter 5 Lesson 2
Chapter 5 Lesson 3
Chapter 5 Lesson 4
Chapter 5 Lesson 5
Chapter 5 Lesson 6
Chapter 5 Lesson 7
Chapter 5 Lesson 8

Note that if I did not provide enough lesson enumerations for all my chapters, Scholaric would repeat the last one to fill out the remaining chapters.

Happy Planning