.apkg association with AnkiDroid

[Wisam]

Hi,

I am using a deck for a class I'm teaching. Some students asked me if they can automatically open .apkg file on their Nexus 7 device and Ankidroid will automatically import the new cards.

Since I'm adding every week's class as a sub deck of the main one (it is a work in progress deck). Every week I am emailing them a new version of the deck. 

Is it possible to add association for .apkg files to Ankidroid directly  ? 

Let me know if you think there is a better way to do it. Right now I ask the students to use Anki desktop and sync with the cloud then sync with their Android.

Thanks!!

Wisam

[Tim]

Hi you can import apkg's from AnkiDroid using the "Import cards" option from the main menu.

I recommend you put the new cards you want to share with them into a new subdeck in Anki Desktop, then export the subdeck to an apkg file which you share with them, then they save it to their AnkiDroid folder and choose "Import Cards".

[Wisam Al-Rawi]

I know I can import the cards from inside the app itself but if I send the file to their email Gmail app cannot download the file since no app has association with .apkg so it does not know what to do and shows an error message.

 If they download from a website it would be easier for them to just tap on the downloaded file and it would be imported automatically.

Yes, I'm planning to export only the new sub-deck and give it to them. Just to make things easier. BTW, in case I wanted to add new cards to the other sub-decks would it be a problem if you do import cards ? I assume Ankidroid will import only new cards, right?

--
 
 

[Tim]

Ah sorry I didn't read your post properly; you want AnkiDroid to be capable of opening apkg files, and automatically start the import process when one is opened (for example from gmail). If this were done I believe Android should automatically ask the user if they want to open the file with AnkiDroid when they try to open it (no need to set associations like on windows).

It makes sense to do this, and Anki Desktop already behaves this way. Feel free to propose it as a new enhancement on the issue tracker.

[Wisam Al-Rawi]

Thanks Tim for your help. I submitted a ticket in the issue tracker which includes some of the information you mentioned (I tested both on Windows and Mac and double clicking a .apkg file automatically gets the cards imported by Anki Desktop

https://code.google.com/p/ankidroid/issues/detail?id=1642&thanks=1642&ts=1359122532

So far all of the students are excited about the app. My colleague and I are looking to assess their learning at the end of the semester and publish a paper.

[Nicolas Raoul]

Hi Wisam,

Nice to hear about this use in a class.
I am very interested in any paper you publish about this and the results!
I am sure some students don't have phones, it does not seem fair for
them, how do you address this problem?

By the way, if you have some spare time, a video for AnkiDroid 2 would
be great :-)

Cheers!
Nicolas Raoul

[Wisam Al-Rawi]

Hi Nicholas,

Good to hear from you! It is a very exciting project. We applied for a grant but the school unfortunately did not see any potential benefit for Anki. So my colleague who is a professor in the department of oral pathology at the University of Michigan and I decided to use our own research funds to get this project started this semester. He is teaching 107 second year dental students (oral pathology) and my class is about 22 dental hygiene students (oral radiology).

We did a survey last semester using Google Drive to see what type of devices the students have. For the bigger dental class we will give them just licenses to Anki on iOS. For my class we provided the students with 11 Nexus 7 devices for those who were interested. Other students have their own devices (iPhone, Android, iPad, Samsung tablets) so we provided again those with iOS copies of Anki and the rest downloaded Ankidroid. Some students preferred to study on their tablets over phones due to smaller screen of the phone Ex:iPhone. Our decks have an explanation field below the answer. I believe this helps with the didactic learning the dental students need. 

We told the students they always have the option to use their computer to study and some prefer that option. I guess it would be a good point to have in the questionnaire at the end of testing to ask and see if not having a phone was an issue or something like that. If anyone here is interested to provide feedback on the questionnaire to get some information please let me know.

We were fortunate to have Ankidroid 2 released by first week of January so we avoided deck upgrades and other possible issues with the beta. I called Apple Education and after some do diligent work, I got enrolled into their Volume Purchasing Program so now I can order at 50% discount for 20+ license of Anki. We ordered 50 license so far. 

The new sub-deck feature helps. Every week I create a sub deck to cover that week class topic with 15 - 20 cards and I post the .apkg file on the course website and ask the students to download the file to their computer and sync with their account then sync with Ankidroid and Anki for iOS. We thought this would be easier for them. I'm not sure if the students can directly import on iOS like Ankidroid does. 

We asked the students to sign a consent form to send us their decks by the end of the course (end of April) so we can do statistical analysis to compare their final exam scores with last year's scores and scores among themselves to see if it is statistically significant to use Anki for learning. We hope to publish the data in the Journal of Dental Education and present it. It is still to early for that right now. We asked the students, if they are interested, to submit or create their own cards and upon verification by the faculty member (us), we will incorporate the good ones. Everyone is happy so far. It takes a ton of work to create the cards though! 

The video is due. I have been busy preparing for all of this. Let me try to work on it this weekend.

Thank you guys for the awesome work! :)

Wisam

--

[Houssam Salem]

That sounds very interesting. I'd love to see the results. I'd be happy to give you feedback on your questionnaire.

Where is most of the time spent in creating new cards? Is it the content itself or is it something Anki can improve (entering data, card presentation, etc)?

[Wisam Al-Rawi]

Hi Houssam,

Most of the time is spend on creating the cards themselves, particularly providing explanation for the correct answer and the incorrect answers. One thing in particular that would help in Anki is making the displayed font in the browser's window bigger (I am using 1080P 23" monitor) as the fonts are hard to read. Adding a dictionary for spell checking will help too.

We plan to work on the questionnaire in April. We will use Google Docs as our University is using that for everyone. I will be happy to hear from you before we send it to them. Thanks.

Wisam

[Houssam Salem]

You can make the fields inside the browser (and add/edit windows) bigger. See the manual for that. Unless you mean the interface itself, in which case I don't think you can make bigger.

[jati...@gmail.com]