I’m liking the new Exercises interface - the trail maps let a user see some genuine progress through a topic.
The peer review portion sometimes falls flat, unfortunately, due to the simple fact that not enough people are looking at the submissions quickly enough. With each person who attempts an exercise asked to review one previous solution, there’s always going to be a backlog - it might be a long time before my solution rises to the top of the to-be-reviewed queue, by which time I’ll have completely forgotten what the exercise was about. (Most of my submissions have never been reviewed, weeks later).
Clearing the backlog requires a 100% participation rate (which will never happen, because there are lazy people everywhere) and a constant influx of new students on each problem.
But, a fix is simple - strongly encourage each student to do at least two reviews, not giving credit for completing an exercise until the learner has reviewed two others’ submissions.
(I’m trying to do this, even though the interface doesn’t encourage it - you can always jump to random solutions using the left sidebar. I’ll do two reviews for each solution I submit from here on).
Additionally, if I completed exercise Foo last month and exercise Bar today, and the oldest solution awaiting review is for Foo, prompt me to review that one - no need for the queues to be local to each exercise. This will let new students who complete old material to get their reviews done quickly as well, without having to wait for someone else to sign up. This might be a bit trickier to implement than the other suggestion, though; I think requiring two rather than one is the easier win.