Teach, Learn and Explore. Together. Version v0.5.0 releaseWe are elated to announce the release of SocratiQ v0.5.0. With this release we have moved a lot closer to our goal of being “School in a Box” - an all in one platform for schools to manage their curriculum, teaching, learning, knowledge management, collaboration, communication and assessments.
Over the past months, we have been pushing out features at a frantic pace, incrementally adding immense value to the platform. We focussed this release in bringing clarity, robustness and make collaboration effective and seamless. We believe that we have accomplished the goals we have set out to achieve and more.
On the technical front, this brings a brand new layout engine, local storage and sync mechanism. We have rewritten more than 90% of the UI code to make sure SocratiQ performs well on all devices even when the knowledge graph becomes large.
We are looking forward to hearing from you and continue the virtuous cycle of rapid development followed by principled iterations.
With those pesky details out of the way, let’s focus on the features and improvements.
Home Page Revamp
We have completely redesigned the SocratiQ home page to make it easy to navigate, convenient to switch between contexts, and clearly organized to reduce friction. Better looking too, if we can say so ourselves.
We see the home page and the dashboard growing into a command center for teachers and students, designed to surface the tasks that require attention.
Navigation We now have a collapsible sidebar navigation with clear labels and convenient shortcuts.
Shortcuts Switching to your organizations and profile is now a breeze. You can now access 3 of your most used organizations directly from the navbar.
Indicators The home page menu also has a few indicators to signal actions required from you. We’ll be adding more of these in the future.
Focus, clarity & organization It is now easy to access your workspaces, create new explorations or check your overall insights.
By clearing some space and organizing the dashboard, this also sets us up for upcoming features in our incredible roadmap.
Better Collaboration
SocratiQ’s collaboration features involved sharing a join code through other communication mediums. We believe this is the most non-intrusive way to invite people to collaborate with you.
SocratiQ 0.5 retains this mode of sharing, but also adds two new and convenient ways to invite people to collaborate with you. Both of them send an email on your behalf to the invitee.
There is now a dedicated section on the SocratiQ dashboard to manage your invitations and enter the join code.
With these additions, we believe that we have removed all the friction associated with collaborative exploration of interesting topics for independent learners.
That’s not all, we have added an incredible feature for classrooms / schools along the same lines. Keep reading.
Group Assignments
SocratiQ 0.5 plugs a big gap between our vision and execution. In order to have group assignments, teachers had to create an assignment and then share the join code with other students. This friction has now been eliminated. The group assignment workflow is as smooth as individual assignments. You can even mix and match as long as you create distinct teams.
Our roadmap includes plans to make this workflow even better. But for now, the gap has been bridged.
Topic Mastery in Group Assignments
We have huge plans for extensive reporting and insights. For now the topic mastery and the quiz scores offer insights into the student’s learning progress. Since we have group assignments, we need a way for teachers to see each individual’s progress towards mastery within the group.
We are very happy to have managed to add this feature without introducing another UI element to learn and remember.
UI Improvements
We make sure that with every SocratiQ release we incrementally improve existing features. We are especially excited about the improvements in this release as we believe they are huge quality of life improvements for students and teachers.
Better Outline View
We have revamped the outline view to make it more intuitive and easier to use. Every column in the outline view has a header of the parent node. We have also fine-tuned outline view navigation bar to be more predictable.
We love using outline view when we are exploring or creating curriculums in SocratiQ, this improvement is a personal favorite for us.
Faster / Robust Canvas
You’ll have to use it to experience this. Our graph layouts and the underlying storage have been completely rewritten to be fast, smooth and responsive. We are seeing very large knowledge graphs being built with SocratiQ and we want to make sure SocratiQ performs well on low end devices as well.
Our goal is to bring SocratiQ to the every last student and while we don’t have a screen shot for this, this is easily the largest and most significant update to SocratiQ in this release. Just in case you missed it, we have rewritten more than 90% of the UI code to accomplish this.
Show less but See more
SocratiQ’s collapse feature did not collapse the graph until now, it simply hid the collapsed notes. Our massive UI rewrite has made collapse and contract not just possible but also super fast. Now you can easily tame a huge knowledge graph by collapsing things that are not in focus.
L2R Topical
You can now see topics organized in a top down fashion as usual or horizontally from left to right and switch between them at convenience.
A lot more is coming your way
This release graduates SocratiQ from a tool to a platform and a comprehensive solution for schools. With the foundational workflow in place, our focus now turns towards improving the quality of teaching, learning, feedback and assessments. Our upcoming features will bring our innovations in intentional learning, active and incremental personalization to unprecedented new heights.
With this release we are also exiting our pilot phase and moving into full-fledged implementations. If you are a teacher or a school, we would love to talk to you about our budget friendly pricing and implementations as collaborative partnerships.
Talk to us: Email or schedule a demo.
Don’t forget
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