Monalect's Vision

Introduction

Monalect is a user-led self-learning management system meant to provide an environment for you to study in. This page will detail in many words what monalect is, what Monalect is as a project, and what you have to look forward to.

Project Values

  1. Egalitarian Liberty: Every user should be free to study what they want with equal ability and accessibility. No user should feel less able to learn, especially due to financial differences.
  2. User-centric: Monalect is user-led. Users create content, and users are the ones that drive value. Thus, Monalect is built to serve the userbase, instead of govern.
  3. Mature: Monalect is mature and doesn't infantilize or condescend its users.
  4. Invisible: The user shouldn't notice Monalect when using it. No conflicts, confusions, and surprises with the user experience, essentially.
  5. Clear and Clean: Monalect is clear in what it presents to users. The user should never feel "cluttered", and should always know what to do next.
  6. Collaborative: Monalect tries to enhance user collaboration and socially-driven learning.

Philosophy & Vision

The first thing to understand about Monalect is that we don't believe learning alone is fun or enjoyable. It isn't enjoyable trying to read dryly written facts, and writing notes for hours on end under your own accountability. It isn't enjoyable not knowing where you're going or what you're doing. It isn't enjoyable feeling like you'll forget what you learn in a few weeks because revisiting old material always feels redundant and painful.

It isn't enjoyable to study alone, with few people to discuss the material with. It isn't enjoyable forgetting why you're learning, and not knowing what the consequences of your learning are. It isn't enjoyable feeling like everything is scattered.

Learning, like any skill, is not fun unless you witness the growth of its qualities relative to others. Knowledge in this case. Monalect tries to alleviate all of that overhead, and make learning feel constructive so that when you do write notes for hours, it feels like you're going somewhere and it thus becomes an attractive experience instead of an aversive one.

Secondly, Monalect is an extension of traditional education, rather than a dilineation. That means although it is an autodidactic system much like SuperMemo, it aims to use familiar methods of learning that the user will intuitively understand. It makes use of course structures, note-taking, examination and review, and a nuclear organization of education around textbooks and lectures.

It's important firstly for the obvious reason of wider appeal, but secondly because traditional methods hold a style of organization that has a clear start and a clear finish. They have clear markers for how much you know and how well you know it. These quantitative aspects are important for feedback in the psychological sense, and allows the user a dialogue with their material.

Monalect does not aim to replace traditional education. We fully believe in institutional and organizational schooling, and certification. Humans are smart because we collaborate and compete in those environments. We only want to emulate that type of learning so that it's accessible for everyone with a computer and an internet connection, and create that social space online to connect with others who are learning as well. We won't care for trying to provide certification, and diplomas.

At most, we'll provide support for entering academia where it's open, such as through academic writing, although the path from where you start in a field to doing research in that field is very, very long, and very, very confusing. Thus, it's a low priority for now.

Before, it used to be entirely inaccessible for most people due to the costs of academic journals, ones where really only universities could foot the bill to provide for students and faculty. Technically it's accessible through the researchers of papers if you were outgoing enough, but thankfully now you don't have to go through all that due to Sci-Hub and the open access movement.

Initial Features

Monalect's initial features will forego any type of social network, but it will happen. For the initial project, the most you can do is import and export your courses and share it with others off-site. The initial features are instead focused on providing the basis for learning by yourself in a constructive environment.

Courses

Courses are the primary parts of the app. You create/import a course, you go through the course, you complete the course. Courses are composed of three primary things: lessons, questions, and learning material.

Lessons are the primary divisions of the course. You split questions and learning material up into seperate lessons. If you import a course, lessons should be pre-created for you.

You can create questions as you study, and assign them to a lesson when you do, but if your course is imported, you likely have questions already pre-created for you. The questions are used to create quizzes and exams. Quizzes are informal and largely for practice and review, while exams are a formal and strict way to measure your knowledge. Exams are done based on lesson selection, and exams determine the marks of your lessons.

The learning material is the stuff you're learning from. Right now, it's only composed of textbooks and articles. Textbooks are divided into sections that can be assigned to lessons, while articles can't be divided, and are wholly assigned to a lesson.

Lessons determine how much of the course you completed, with marks received from exams. You're intended to examinate against a lesson once you've finished studying it.

To study a lesson, you have two ways that can both be done at the same time. You have the text-reader, where you can highlight, and you have a notebook where you can write your notes in. They can be used seperately or together.

If you don't have questions pre-created, then you also create questions here as a further exercise in study. If you encounter questions in the textbook, you can also create questions there.

The study method is very boring for now, but will be improved upon. We'll add lectures, audio notes, index cards, and a variety of other methods you can choose at course creation.

When you've reached a minimum mark defined at course creation (defaulted to 90%), you are allowed and prompted the option to complete a course. When you complete a course, the course becomes read-only. You can revisit notes, and do quizzes, but you can only do practice exams. The marks become static after you complete a course.

Course Creation and Sharing

You can create personal courses for yourself, and share the framework of that course with others to use. The intended difference between a course created from scratch, and a course being shared after its studied and completed, is that the empty course has no questions for self-examination, has no defined lessons, and the user is entirely in charge of organizing the course.

We'll provide you templates of popular subjects you can use and see how it's supposed to work.

However, when importing or exporting a course, only the metadata of the learning material is shared. The pdf files of the learning materials are NOT shared due to copyright reasons. You'll have to upload the file again, using the metadata as a guide.

For our provided templates we will only have textbooks from the Open Textbook Library, which are all free to download legally.

Final Words

Monalect is meant to be free, simple, and intuitive. We want everyone to be able to learn, and experience learning in a progressive way. Look forward to our launch!