CampusBug: Good Concept, Buggy Execution

CampusBug is dedicated to a concept they call social learning. Their goal is to make education a community experience much like FaceBook and MySpace, but with actual hands on help with homework, classes and hands on learning.

The concept intrigued me, and I eagerly went to the site to check it out. That was on Monday, and it took me this long to get the site to work long enough to review its features. That isn't good. All week the site experienced inconsistent load times, often coming to a complete standstill and needing to be rebooted before a task was finished.

That's not good when you have an idea this complex. There are so many social networks out there now that to have a site glitch like that for even one day, much less a week, your target market will go to another site that works. Often it won't matter if you get it fixed either, by the time someone leaves a social network of any kind for lack of service or problems, the chances of getting them back are slim. By the end of the week load times had gotten better for me, by by then I was frustrated and not enjoying the experience.

Why do I say the site is complex? It offers an astonishing number of features for people to choose from. The layout is fairly plain, with simple graphics to represent each section. That's a nice change from the usual teal, brown or green “Web 2.0 look”. The navigation tabs include: Homeroom, Inbox, Blogs, EZ Writing, Flashcards, News, Pictures, Polls, Question Bank, Video, Test Room, Interest Tags, Games, Search, and More. The More tab leads to extras like Rapid Learning and Bookmarks.

I liked that the site placed their version of the ubiquitous tag cloud on its own page (Interest Tags). I am not a fan of the tag cloud navigation style, although I know many people like it. It's nice when you don't have to look at a huge tag cloud cluster right on the front page of a site. Like other sites, relevant and popular tags are given more weight by color and position in the cloud.

By far the most useful feature of the site, in my opinion, is the ability to take practice assessment tests in the test room. If the student has the SAT, the ACT, the GMAT or other assessments coming up, they can use CampusBug to give the tests a trial run. This in turn should improve their performance on the actual test. Not only will they have practiced taking it, they'll be more relaxed and confident once the actual test time rolls around. The social aspect adds the chance to compare scores with, and get advice from, other students in real time.

There is a fun aspect to the site as well. Along with the ability to make friends and connect with other students, CampusBug offers a place to upload and view videos and pictures and to play games and read news. Relaxation and fun are important in education, and this gives students a place to take a break from studying or doing their homework online. Students can also ask each other questions in the Question Bank (questions appearing on the site range from pondering the benefits of vegetarianism to politics and school assignment clarification) or take a Poll of their fellow students on an issue.

That's right, CampusBug even offers students a way to write online and complete homework assignments, complete with online file storage and convenient “anywhere” retrieval. With EZ Writer, Blogs and Flashcards students have plenty of places to work on their writing skills. Flashcards allows students or teachers a place to make learning tools for different topics. Just browsing through brought back flashbacks of high school with Flashcards on topics like Nerve Cells and Electrical Signals and various Maths. EZ Writing provides a way for students to write papers and articles for other students to read, and the Blogs provide a more personal outlet.

As with any other social networking site, there are ways to rate content and users, make friends and send messages. Overall I think the concept behind the site is solid. They seem to offer some excellent writing tools for online documents and plenty of resources for actual hands on learning, in a different and more student driven way than other sites out there. The page load times and the constant freezing of the site was a huge issue, and one I experience on a variety of browsers (Camino, Safari and FireFox) at varying times of day. If they can get that under control, they may be on to something.