My Chess Courses Implemented With Lichess Studies

Continued from
jomega's Blog • My Chess Courses Implemented With Lichess Studies • lichess.org

As promised, here is a retrospective on the development of my chess courses implemented with Lichess Studies.

The idea of an online, active chess book.

At the start of 2018 I started implementing a chess book using Lichess studies. The idea was to teach chess from the novice level to just under master strength. I liked the idea of the book being online and having active features. I liked that Lichess was free.

I broke the material into classes I called Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. I thought of the material as being presented in courses. At the time I knew very little about Lichess study capabilities, however I saw that the ability to put links into move comments would allow interconnecting studies, chapters, other material on Lichess, and other sites.

What are Lichess studies?

I plan to blog about Lichess studies capabilities soon. I'll put a link here to that blog once it is done. In the meantime, I'm going to assume you know the basic capabilities of studies - in particular that studies are collections of games or positions organized by chapter, and that each chapter is basically a PGN game entry. Studies are actually more than a PGN file.

Active chapters give interactive courses.

Lichess study chapters have multiple possible modes to implement active chapters. These allows the reader to interact with the material. I made extensive use of these features to make the courses interactive.

One of those modes is an interactive lesson. The reader can, for instance, supply a move as an answer to a question posed about a position. There is only ability to specify one correct move sequence, but alternate moves that are also correct can say so. They then lead back to asking the question again. Incorrect moves may also have associated text. Hints can be asked for. After the lesson is done, the entire PGN becomes visible for inspection. This was just what I needed to implement the usual chess puzzle.

Another possible mode is practice with computer. This allows you to have a position as the chapter that the reader will play against the computer. I used this feature extensively in the endgame studies because there are many possible correct move sequences.

Implementing a table of contents, and references for the courses.

I implemented a table of contents, and references for the courses, by having no moves for the chapters and using text and links. An index would have been more challenging. To date, I've only made an index for the games in the course. That was done by making a study that has chapters with names A-Z and then using the first letter of the last name of the White player as the index key. Links then go to the corresponding place in the course for that game.

Special case of the endgame.

In order for the courses to be a reference people could use for the endgame, I decided to implement the endgame material in the normal way books do it - by endgame type. I then created a special study that listed the recommended learning order, and which endgame topics went with which courses. This turned out to be a good way to do it, as indicated by the large number of people who have marked the endgame top level study as a favorite.

Almost all text is move comments.

Studies were not meant for the purpose of writing large amounts of text. The text is usually done as a move comment. Large amounts of text as move comments are a problem because, if "Inline notation" is off, they are eclipsed ([...]) in the score window. With inline notation on, large amounts of text requires scrolling, and it interrupts reading moves of a game. Comments can only have so much text before it is chopped off. Reading the comments in the window under the board not only has the scrolling issue for the text itself, but also the entire browser window might need scrolling.

Study and chapter pinned comments have some of the same issues.

I tried using Lichess Team forums for large amounts of text. However, Team forum posts time-out, and then can no longer be edited. In fact, an entire Team thread can become locked due to time-out. Today, one might try to use the new Lichess Blog ability for large text.

Nevertheless, I made do, and for the most part adding text was not a problem.

Chapter limit.

There is currently a limit of 64 chapters to each study. This rarely was an issue because I could break the material into many studies that were linked. The chapter limit is an issue for importing collections of games that exceed 64 games, or puzzle collections that exceed that amount. Studies are not a chess database replacement!

Offline backup of studies.

Not all the text in a study is saved to a downloaded PGN file. As examples, the hints in an interactive lesson are not saved in the PGN, and the chapter titles are not saved. Hence, you cannot backup studies completely. Any chat room text and any pinned Study/Chapter comments might also have to be backed up by hand. I did backups often.

Potential readers.

Potential readers might not have had Lichess accounts. They may not have been familiar with Lichess at all. Even if they did have Lichess accounts, they might have never used studies or the tools available. Hence, there would be a learning curve for some readers. I decided that people would manage the learning curve, and that turned out to not be an issue.

As an example, people from our chess club had a long learning curve for use of Lichess studies because they lack computer skills and experience. With patience, they learned to create their own studies and how to annotate their own games in those studies. They learned to use the Lichess tools.

Reader feedback.

Reader feedback could have been done in a few ways. The chat room could be have been used. However, text in the chat may scroll off, and I would have to constantly monitor the chats. I ended up with so many studies that monitoring them would have been prohibitive. I decided to turn the chat off and instead rely on people sending me direct messages if they had feedback. That is exactly what happened, and without even prompting for them to do that.

Popularity/usefulness of the studies might be judged by the number of readers marking the study as a favorite. However, Lichess conflates favorite with likes. That is a problem because people remove the study as a favorite once they feel they will not need quick access to it. That decreases the likes!

Organization was key!

In my case the amount of material I wanted to present was huge. I have 929 chapters total in the Beginner and Intermediate Courses spread across 85 studies! The Advanced Course will probably have 500+ chapters when it is done. Like the creation of any large work, organization was vital. I kept track of the studies/chapters and their content in a spreadsheet. I needed to learn how to back up everything - a Lichess API does exist.

Conclusion.

Overall, I think the decision to use Lichess to implement an online, active chess book worked well. It has been gratifying to see the use of the studies grow. I've enjoyed the private messages from many of the study's users. The Lichess community has helped improve the studies through these messages.

Next Blog in This Series

In the next blog in this series I'll discuss the general use of Lichess studies.

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Table of Contents for all my studies

I have written many other Lichess studies. All my studies are cross linked. Here is a table of contents for all my studies.
Jomega Studies Table of Contents (lichess.org)

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I hope you enjoy this blog series. Likes are really appreciated.