I totally love chess mentor but have similar issues with its Navigation. In all, there should be some things quite easy to fix without too much effort on your side:
1. Make it possible to jump back from an individual lesson to the lesson list / overview of a course.
At the moment this is not possible and quite annoying. It should be easy to include that in the navigation panel in the bottom right corner: http://screencast.com/t/vrEha1u2fO0N
So if I am studying one of Dejan Bojkovs Knight endgames I can jump back to see all the lessons of this course.
I generally study lessons in courses so they are not random.
At the moment you have to do a new search for endgame courses, then select the course. With a lot of courses when you might even have to step through multiple pages this gets annoying.
2. Add Course bundling to my completed lessons
Same as JG27Pyth sais: the list of the lessons I have completed is only organized by lessons, but not by courses. So if I started Dejan Bojkovs Knight endings course and wanna continue - how do I find the course when I come back the next day? This is going to the list of lessons I completed (Button "Start page" in the Mentor navigation).
Well - I could click an individual lesson and start from there. But this has two problems:
1. The lessons do not indicate from which course they originate:
http://screencast.com/t/eeOjLq91
There is an abstract six-digit-code for each lesson. But this is neither clickable nor is it intuitive as to understand which course that is.
If I wanna find the course, I am back to square one like in the situation described in my first navigation problem: I gotta do a new search to find the course.
It should not be too hard to include a column in the Lesson overview that has the course title and links to this courses lesson list / overview.
Maybe people do not use chess mentor like I do, always using complete courses. It took me a while even to find out that the lessons are organized this way (!).
Without this structure, chess mentor can be intimidating and appear random with oh so many similar lectures. When I first used chess mentor and did not find it was grouped in courses, I completely stopped using it, because I did not see a system. Only the study plans got me to the idea there was a structure behind the lessons.
But it could be good for your business. If I like a course author, I grow fond of his lectures and wanna complete the course. This makes me come back and renew my diamond membership.
Chess Mentor is wonderful. I just finished the Pawn Endings: beginner to expert course and I can't say enough good things about it. But....
Guys, reviewing material and switching between courses in chess mentor is VERY clumsy and aggravating. It can't be that hard. It needs an overhaul.
As an example: I began the Pawn Endings course while midway thru Silman's Roots of Positional Understanding. I am finding it difficult to return to that course. I basically have to restart it -- when I click "begin training" (sequential) I'm sent to silman's world champion's 1, course (which is just random?)
But I have other issues with Chess Mentor...
One of the core principles of learning is repeated reviewing material after it has 'been learned'
I should (easily) be able to :
Find and navigate to any lesson I've already done, in order to redo/review it.
Flag lessons so that I can quickly return to them if they need more study, and flag lessons that I want to mark as "completed" no matter what my score (just because I scored 95% on a lesson doesn't necessarily mean I don't want to return to it, nor does scoring 50% on a lesson necessarily mean that I feel I want to spend time on it again.)
Navigate between courses quickly and easily. There should be a "courses in progress" and "courses completed" history. The lesson history should be complete (not the previous 20 or 25 or whatever it is currently... some courses have 100+ lessons. How am i supposed to get back to the middle lessons?
END of REQUEST...
My speculative two-cents on this situation:
I have a hunch that the lack of lesson/course navigation arises from Chess Mentor having been designed around the ambitious adaptive feature where it selects the next lesson for you based on your prefs and a lot of user-selected filtering. It was an idea worth trying... but how many people are using Chess Mentor adaptively (you might give a poll)? I know I don't, I don't trust CM to select the lessons I actually want. I don't trust the ratings given to lessons to accurately reflect whether i need to study the lesson or not. I don't trust the filtering to work for me finding what I need (although i can see a lot of effort went into creating the filtering options). The "filtering" I trust is a "course" -- a set of lessons -- grouped by a human intelligence to optimize learning a specific chess topic.
I could run down all the reasons why I don't like the adaptive feature, but I have no real beef with it -- I'm not an unsatisfied user of it, I'm a non-user -- The adaptive feature might work for some; I'm not at all saying get rid of it. But if you think the adaptive feature meets my needs for CM, it does not. I enjoy studying Chess Mentor lessons in a more conventional style -- I follow courses as though they were chapters in a book. I will bet you that the majority of users are using chess mentor as I am, and not adaptively.
I hope you will accomodate us non-adative CMentor users with better navigation in the CM lessons/courses!
Thanks.