The current AnkiHub business model seems to be to have “studiers” pay a monthly fee, which makes a lot of sense where the “studiers” are adults (whether college/grad school students or others). However, this model mostly excludes “studiers” who are children. There are about 50 million K-12 students in the US alone, so I’d suggest this is a very big addressable market you should consider.
Personal use cases I have in mind:
As a homeschooling parent, I want to be able to create decks to share with my children. However, paying for one account per kid (I have four; many families I know have 6-8 - homeschooling families are often big!) at $5 per month gets too pricey very fast.
As a Sunday School teacher and trainer of altar servers for my church, I’d like to make decks of things the kids need to know/memorize, but I don’t want them to need to pay to study them.
Use cases I could identify for friends of mine:
3. As a K-12 teacher, I want to be able to make decks for my students and have them study without payment. Ideally I could track their progress somehow.
4. As a freelance Latin tutor, I want to be able to make decks for my students and have them study without payment.
The general theme of all of these is a setup where someone can pay to publish a deck for a limited audience, but allow the “studiers” to study those particular decks for free (because typically the “studiers” are kids).
Even better in these cases were if AnkiHub could itself include the AnkiWeb sync functionality within itself, so that students would just need to create an account in one place, and then could study on the web or in AnkiDroid.
These are really awesome ideas. We’ve already discussed a “classroom” model and your thoughts add some great insight. I’m hoping we can add this in the near future
Great! When you get around to reading it, I’d be happy to be a beta tester.
In the meantime, is there anyway to hack use case (1) (homeschooling parent wanting to have shared decks for kids) in the current system? For example, if I have one paid AnkiHub account, can I use it across my account and the four kids’ account on the same machine, with each of the five accounts having distinct AnkiWeb accounts. Will that work and still track each kid’s progress separately?
I don’t think that will work under the current configuration.
@andrew are there any short term solutions to this?
I’m thinking it’d be something like a monthly “classroom” fee depending on size of the classroom (I.e. 1-5, 6-10, 11-19, 20+, 50+, etc). This would allow that many users to access AnkiHub and only access that one deck.
For example, a teacher has a class of 10 students. They pay $10/mo and can distribute their deck on AnkiHub and 10 students can access it on AnkiHub, but only access that deck.
There’s no workaround that wouldn’t require significant dev time. We hope to provide workflows that would support your use case in the future. This would also support use cases such as a university purchasing accounts for their students, etc. GitHub Organizations provides a great example of how something like this should be implemented.
That said, I think AnkiHub could support the use case you mentioned, with a little effort on your part.
This would be a bit tedious, but I believe something like the following should work:
Create a unique user for each child on the machine you want them to use so they can have a unique log in
This is necessary to have separate Anki installations on the same machine. Separate Anki profiles won’t work because you need unique AnkiWeb and AnkiHub accounts.
Install Anki for each user
Create an AnkiWeb account for each user
Create an AnkiHub account for each user. Subscribe to the deck, log in from the add-on and sync.
In the future, we hope to support bypassing the Anki desktop requirement so users can subscribe to a deck and sync directly from AnkiMobile and AnkiDroid. But would be quite a bit down the road.
The classroom plan sounds like a good idea. The only tweak I would suggest (and you may not have intended the “one” here as a limitation) is that I would let them share multiple decks with the audience they are paying for, since they may teach multiple distinct subjects to the same students.
Create a unique user for each child on the machine you want them to use so they can have a unique log in
This is necessary to have separate Anki installations on the same machine. Separate Anki profiles won’t work because you need unique AnkiWeb and AnkiHub accounts.
Would it be possible to have the Ankihub plugin uses a different AnkiHub account for each Anki profile, just like AnkiWeb syncing is different for each profile? That would simplify this part of the process without requiring the heavy lifting of eliminating the need for the Anki desktop application altogether.
I don’t believe so, unfortunately (@jakub.f , can you confirm? I’m not familiar with the details of support for multiple profiles). That’s why you would need to create a separate login on the machine, to create isolated Anki installations. If you are tech-savvy, you could point Anki to a unique base directory for each student when starting it from the command line. This would avoid the need to create separate logins on the machine. What operating system are you using? Any other ideas, @jakub.f ? Maybe I’m not thinking of something obvious (it wouldn’t be the first time!).
The add-on changes its behavior based on the active Anki profile. If you have multiple Anki profiles you should only login into AnkiHub in one profile.
Actually you can use different AnkiHub accounts on different Anki profiles. The data and behavior of the AnkiHub add-on is isolated per Anki profile. (The add-on creates a separate subfolder in user files for each Anki profile.)
The docs just say
If you have multiple Anki profiles you should only login into AnkiHub in one profile.
because most people don’t have multiple AnkiHub accounts.
hello, as a teacher I would want functionality where I can have students access a private deck and not need an account.
As well, the ability to embed a deck into an LMS would also be great.
Many students or parents are busy, and while they may have good intentions the follow through is not great. Or they simply do not have the funds to pay for an account.
Keep in mind some teachers are paying for this from there own pockets and may not be able to pay for each student to have access-that can get expensive.
So just being able to provide a url to click on (maybe with a password) for private decks and then being able to use and review the deck would be great.
Then adding the ability to embed a deck in an LMS would further enhance the use of the flashcards.
I’m leaning towards Quizlet right now because of the embed function.
So the things as a teacher that are most helpful:
-private deck with url that allows non account holders to use and review the deck without an account
-ability to embed deck into an LMS to be used and reviewed without an account
-basically I the teacher pays for access and then anyone with the link or access to LMS can use and review the private deck