At Shoelace, we strive to be fully transparent about changes that directly affect you and your players. This article details the benefits (and the one caveat) of opting into the new learning engine.
What is the learning engine exactly?
The learning engine is responsible for choosing what questions and passages your player(s) will be given during regular game play. It takes into account both your players’ reading comprehension levels (RCLs) and their proficiency on individual skills.
Here’s why you should opt in.
1. Introducing Skill Tiers
We’ve developed a new system for classifying our questions for skills into three tiers: Learning, Practicing, and Mastering. These tiers make it super easy for you to see at a glance where your students are on individual skills. It also means we can deliver skill practice with higher precision than ever before. And we’ve got brand new reports to help show off their progress.
Above: The new tiering system makes it easy to get deeper information on player’s skill development. The tiers indicate if a player is currently Learning, Practicing, or Mastering and the bar represents their progression towards completing their current tier.
Learn more about the tiers here (and get access to a highly informative skill PDF).
2. Early Access to our NEW Educator Dashboards
We are in the process of launching a brand new dashboard and we feel so strongly that these new reports are better than ever and so we’re giving early access to those on the new Learning Engine. It’s super easy to access, as you don’t have to change a thing you’ve been doing. Just go to the Reports tab and click on the NEW Skill Report or NEW Reading Comprehension Report and you’ll be whisked over to the new site. (Do you like our new color scheme?)
Above: The RCL Player report gives you a detailed look into the players history. While it’s expected for students to have small variations (up and down), if you’re noticing odd behavior (like sudden skyrocketing results or a massive drop) that can be a good indicator that the player has someone either helping them or is randomly guessing. It’s a great time to trigger the placement test, to help the Learning Engine quickly adjust the content back to the player’s needs.
You can read more about these two improved reports here. And don’t worry, the new learning engine continues to work with all the other reports you already know and love (like the placement test report, class activity report, assignment report, and class mission report). BUT, over the next few months we’ll be moving (and improving) these ones too – so keep an eye out.
3. A TON of NEW Content
We have spent a lot of time over the past year creating new content. By moving to our new Learning Engine you and your players get instant access to all of this. We’ve already added over 4 thousand new questions and more than 50 orginal passages. This additional content ensures the learning is fresh and fun and allows your players to have additional practice for each skill, keeping player engagement high even for extended periods of time.
And we’re not done – there is more content being added almost every week!
Caveat: One important note before opting in
The introduction of our new skill tiering system involved a fundamental shift in how we create and deliver our standalone skill questions. As a result, there was no easy way to convert player skill history data into the new skill reports.
The new skill report is only populated by the new learning engine. After opting in, your old skill reports will no longer receive new data. BUT, no worries, you will retain access to the old skill report until July 2023. So if you opt-in today, the old report will contain all previous skill data up through today, while the new skill report will begin collecting data starting from today. Once you’ve opted in, if you hope to look at data across the entire 2022-23 school year, please be aware you will need to refer to both the old skills report and the new skills report.
As the new skill reports need new data, it may take a few play sessions for sufficient data to populate them and offer comprehensive insights. If you want to speed up this process for specific skills, we recommend using the assignment feature. However, we believe in just a few play sessions, you’ll see the immediate benefits of the new learning engine and the new reports.
At this time, skill and grammar assignments are not a selectable option because we are custom building these assignments to be more closely aligned with our new skill tiering system. These assignments will be enabled at a future date, please stay tuned to our marketing emails and your dashboard for updates.
Are you ready to opt in?
We’re so excited to offer these updates for you and your players, and we invite you to opt in to begin enjoying them right away. Log into your dashboard and click the green OPT IN NOW button in the pop-up message! Plus, more phases are in the works. Stay tuned as we keep working on ways to offer the best educational experiences to students through games they love.
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