I’m very underwhelmed by Português em Foco. This is the online, interactive book I mentioned a while ago, which has some good content but a very annoying UI that really casts a shadow over my enjoyment of it. I’ve restarted paid online lessons with Cristina of Say it in Portuguese, because the C1 prep lessons went so well it seemed like it was worth carrying on. We thought we’d try working through the exercises together, so she gamely bought her own license and set up a class on the online site, which is called BlinkLearning.
OK, great so far, I can see the book, she can see the book, everything looks fine, but it doesn’t work as expected.
Firstly, if she sends me homework and I try to click on it, I get taken to the right exercise but the page is frozen and nothing works apart from the “back button”.
If it was just that, it’d be a minor irritation, but there’s more: even if I don’t go via the homework link, and I manage to get some work done, the teacher doesn’t get alerted to the changes I’ve made. In some exercises, she also can’t read the whole of my answers, and I can’t read the whole of her feedback, either, just the first sentence or so, and the marking tools are extremely limited – there is no scope to amend what I’ve written or make suggestions, just give a mark or use a fairly crude highlighting button.
Worse still, I find when I submit oral work as recordings they aren’t reaching her, they just disappear into the ether.
The customer support on the platform hasn’t been very helpful at all: I sent them a screencap video showing me using the site in Chrome so they could see I wasn’t doing anything wrong but after a few days they asked me to do the same actions but this time with the browser console open. Then when I sent them that video they asked me to uninstall all my browser extensions and make a third video with console open again.
Ugh, I don’t have the patience and it’s distracting me, so we’ve just ended up having to work outside the book: The simple fill-in-the-blank exercises work OK, but with the teacher-marked work, I have to, write (or record) the answer outside the website and pass it across to her via a shared google drive. It works well enough, but it’s one of those mildly annoying little extra admin tasks that makes technology harder to use. I suppose it’s still easier than – say – if we were working from a paper book, so maybe I should just get over it, but I have had my expectations raised, so it’s disappointing. They were pretty grudging about exchanging the online teacher license for a paper copy too, which seems pretty shoddy to me. You would think they’d try a bit harder, if only to stop people writing snotty blog posts like this and scaring potential future customers away.
So basically, now Lidel are my enemy.
It’s a shame because I like the exercises. The texts are fun and the questions are challenging, but the platform is not fit for porpoises.
Anyway, disappointing but not crushing. I’ve updated the blurb about Português em Foco on my Study Guides page.
Luso 