Changelog
What's new in Novus Learn
The notable, user-facing updates: new tools, fixes, and improvements. Novus Learn ships in small, verified steps.
Text you can actually read, and a cookie choice that records what you chose
- Six pieces of small text were too faint to read. Uppercase labels on a tinted background were failing the contrast standard: the category badges in search, the file tree and check counts in the code workspace, and the section headings in the navigation menu. That last one is on every page. All six are darker now. Dark mode was already fine and has not changed.
- Saving cookie preferences while your browser sends Global Privacy Control. The Marketing box correctly showed as off and refused to be switched on while GPC was active, but pressing Save wrote down that you had allowed it anyway. Nothing loaded, because the signal is checked again every time — but the stored answer would have taken effect on a browser that stopped sending it. It now records exactly what the page showed you.
- Puzzle progress and matcher sessions are properly guarded. The rule that your first attempt at a puzzle is the one recorded, and the rule that answering another matcher question updates your session rather than starting a second one, are both tested now. Neither was, and both are the kind of thing that goes wrong quietly.
An address for AI clients, every social account, and a route to the rest of the estate
- The footer links to every other Novus site. The registry behind the tool map has listed all ten sites for a long time, and the footer used one field from it: the company name, inside a sentence. So a reader who arrived on a career guide from search had no route to any of the sibling apps, and a search engine saw a site that linked to none of them. The complete list is now in the footer, which is the only thing on every page.
- An MCP endpoint at /mcp. An assistant that speaks Model Context Protocol can now search the catalogue directly and get back links to lessons, guides, assessments and occupation profiles. It reads the same content the pages render, so it cannot describe a lesson that does not exist, and it can do nothing but read.
- Search is no longer blocked for an AI acting on your behalf. robots.txt drew one line for every AI operator, which lumped together two different things: a crawler building an index nobody is waiting on, and an assistant fetching a page because a person just asked for it. The second kind is a visitor. Those agents now reach the tool routes; bulk crawlers are still kept off the surfaces where they would only spend crawl budget, and the API is closed to both.
- All 17 social accounts, on one page. The site listed four. There is now a /social page carrying every account the company actually runs, and the footer and the structured data are built from the same list rather than from three separate hand-typed ones.
- A homepage that says what this is, and a Reasoning Challenge card that goes somewhere. The hero described something the page no longer showed, and the title did not match it either. The forms card on the Reasoning Challenge pointed at a page that had been removed. Both fixed, and the plain-language pass through the landing copy continues.
Two new guides, occupation landings, and per-topic blog feeds
- Reliability engineer and streetworks practice, explained. Two new blog posts map Search Console queries onto pages that already exist: industrial reliability versus site reliability engineering, and streetworks-style mock practice that cites the highway construction occupation and civil-works suites without pretending to issue an accredited card. Each post has its own illustration.
- Career guides for reliability engineer and ecologist. Short landings at /guides cite the live occupation profiles, related aptitude suites, and skill lessons. They are not a second catalog.
- Subscribe to one blog topic. Each blog category now has its own RSS feed and a shareable hub page, advertised with rel=alternate on that hub. The index still lists the three most recent posts as Latest: derived from publish date, not a featured flag.
Every skill lesson now has questions inside it
- The last 13 lessons without a checkpoint have one. All 35 of the 35 skill lessons now carry an in-lesson checkpoint (one after the objectives, one after the worked examples), where 22 did before. The 13 that did not were the workplace and job-role skills: situational, management, customer-service and safety judgment, in-tray, case analysis, planning and scheduling, mechanical, electrical and technical reasoning, typing, monitoring and reaction time. There was no open practice bank for any of them, so those lessons ended with a link instead of a question.
- 260 new practice questions, written for those 13 skills. Each of the 13 now has its own bank of 20 questions in four themed sections, readable in full on the skill's page and downloadable as a worksheet, answer key and worked explanations in six formats. On a judgment question the explanation does two jobs: it says why the best answer is best, and why the option that looks almost as good is worse. Nothing is timed, nothing is scored against other people, and answers are checked on your device.
- An honest note on typing, monitoring, and reaction time. Three of these skills are measured with a clock, and a page of questions cannot measure one. Those banks say so at the top and practise what reading can improve: proofreading a transcript character by character, deciding which alarm actually deserves attention, applying a stop rule correctly, and reading a words-per-minute or millisecond figure for what it is worth on your own hardware.
Aptitude skill lessons now read like lessons
- Every skill lesson now teaches its own skill. 27 of the 35 lessons have been rewritten from scratch. Each one now carries six worked examples belonging to that skill and no other (the division that recovers a price before a 15 percent rise, the two-apart rule that folds a cube net, the turns ratio that steps 230 V down to 23 V), where before they shared one generic passage with the skill's name dropped into it. Objectives, practice tips and the glossary grew to match, and every entry in a lesson's related-topics list now points at a real page on this site rather than a search box. The eight workplace-judgement lessons already had their own scenarios and are unchanged.
- A contents rail that follows you down the page. Every one of the 35 aptitude skill lessons now has a sticky list of its sections beside the text, highlighting the one you are reading and showing where you are in the lesson. Each heading also has its own link, so you can send somebody straight to the glossary or the worked examples rather than to the top of the page.
- Practice questions inside the lesson, not only at the end. Short checkpoints appear inside the lesson (one after the objectives, one after the worked examples) with the explanation shown the moment you check your answer. They are drawn from the open practice bank, scored on your device, and deliberately not added to your practice history: two questions are a check, not an attempt. This first pass reached 22 of the 35 lessons; the 13 workplace and job-role skills had no open practice bank to draw on and still linked out to practice at the foot of the page. That gap was closed the same day. See the entry above.
- Previous and next lesson, and an honest freshness date. You can move straight from one skill lesson to the next instead of returning to the index. Each lesson shows when it was published and when it was last reviewed, with an expandable list of what actually changed on each of those dates.
- Skill lessons are findable in search. The 35 skill lessons were reachable only by browsing. They are now in the site search index under the vocabulary they teach, so searching for a method returns the lesson that explains it.
Study material downloads as a real PDF, a spreadsheet, or plain text
- Aptitude study guides are the whole lesson, not a page of links. Every published suite now publishes a complete study guide: each skill it draws on, that skill's full lesson, worked examples, common pitfalls, practice tips, a glossary, and where the material comes from. The old download was a short outline that pointed back at pages you still had to visit.
- Four formats, identical contents. Pick PDF, HTML, CSV, or plain text. The PDF is a genuine paginated PDF with wrapped text, tables, and page numbers: not a renamed web page. The CSV opens in any spreadsheet with one row per objective, tip, glossary entry, and practice mode, so you can filter and re-sort it. The plain-text edition suits notes apps and screen readers.
- Practice packs travel in more formats too. All eight puzzle categories, all twenty-two Cognitive Skills banks, and every Reasoning Practice Lab module now offer PDF, CSV, and plain text alongside the existing JSON, print-ready HTML, and ZIP. Puzzle figures carry their written description into every text format, so nothing goes missing.
- Answer keys stay where they belong. Downloadable answer keys exist only for the open, untimed practice material whose answers are already public teaching content. Formal aptitude suites and the Novus Reasoning Challenge keep their keys and scoring on the server; no download in any format contains them. Every export now says which of the two it is.
- Your own results and progress download as a PDF too. Your Cognitive Skills Lab progress and any practice result you have on this device now save as a real PDF or plain text, alongside the existing HTML, spreadsheet, and JSON. Each file holds the whole record (every skill, every attempt, your response to every question, and the explanation you were shown) rather than a summary of the screen. The PDF is built on your device, so nothing is uploaded to make it.
A complete visual learning journey across Novus Learn
- The whole platform is visible from the homepage. A new six-chapter interactive guide and opt-in 41-second coded film connect source learning, puzzles and assessments, coding, careers, progress, and local backup. Every chapter has captions, a transcript, keyboard controls, reduced-motion behavior, and a real destination.
- Practice scoring no longer depends on an extra Check click. Saved selections are now the scoring source of truth. Wikipedia, Puzzle, Cognitive Skills, and Practice Lab sessions restore their mode, current item, answers, and scored state after reload. Score all includes every selected response, incomplete submissions show a review step, and results separate answered-item accuracy from completion coverage.
- The known assessment answer-review queue is closed. All forty-one flagged Aptitude and Reasoning Challenge items were reviewed against their stems, choices, keys, and explanations. Incorrect keys were corrected, ambiguous wording was made explicit, and invalid or duplicate answers were replaced; a regression gate prevents unresolved markers returning silently.
- My Learning and portable backup. The new on-device dashboard brings projects, resumable practice, actionable due review, Practice Lab attempts, coding progress and scratchpad drafts, saved careers, roadmaps, recent activity, and honest growth statistics together. A versioned .novuslearn archive validates each supported store, previews and merges safely, or performs an atomic recovery-safe replacement.
- Explore can combine goals, skills, and private progress. The visual catalog now supports multiple learning areas, activity, skill, difficulty, duration, progress, sorting, and detailed career filters in shareable URLs. Progress is joined only inside your browser, mobile filters use a task-focused drawer, and active or invalid values are always visible and removable.
- Puzzles and Cognitive Skills can travel offline. All eight puzzle categories and all twenty-two Cognitive Skills banks now provide structured JSON, print-ready HTML, and ZIP packs with separate learner worksheets, authored hints where they exist, answer keys, and worked explanations. Puzzle figures have accessible SVG and text equivalents.
- Visual hub starts and complete career discovery. Puzzles, Aptitude, Cognitive Skills, Reasoning Challenge, and Coding now open with compact orientation, prominent start or resume actions, visual pathways, and clear next steps. The occupation directory can discover all 565 published occupations with persistent, safely wrapped actions.
- Assessment sessions survive serverless cold starts. Timed Aptitude and Reasoning Challenge sessions now use versioned HMAC-signed stateless claims instead of a process-local memory map, while completed reviews and explanations remain device-local and exportable.
First deep dives into the assessments and careers tools
- The device-local Career Matcher, explained. A new privacy deep dive covers the Quick, Full, and Career Change questionnaires, how twenty career families are scored deterministically, the seventeen inputs the engine refuses to read, browser-local tracking stages, and outbound-only job links.
- Inside the aptitude practice library. A new guide tours the 376 free practice suites: sixty questions in four tiers per suite, skill lessons behind all thirty-five constructs, answer keys that never ship to the browser, device-local attempts, and the editorial review work that continues.
Two guides for finding and sharing study material without an account
- The unified Hub, explained. A new product note walks through ⌘K / Ctrl-K search across Wikipedia topics, local library passages, dictionary terms, study commands, and app destinations, and what stays on-device.
- Accountless share links. A new privacy-focused guide covers packing lessons, decks, quizzes, and visuals into self-contained links, Unlisted versus Public, local link tracking, and what never leaves your browser.
Two new deep dives into adaptive, private study
- Local spaced repetition. A new guide explains how Again, Hard, Good, and Easy build a deterministic review queue, why source evidence stays attached to every card, and which progress remains in the current browser.
- Study shapes for different web pages. A new behind-the-scenes article shows how visible metadata and structural signals tailor the order of study views for documentation, FAQs, how-tos, product pages, and scholarly material without removing any tools.
Three new guides for the connected learning workflow
- Ask and commands, explained. A new deep dive shows how natural-language questions retrieve real source claims, how comparisons keep both evidence trails visible, and why an unsupported question gets an honest no-answer state.
- Whole-site study libraries. A new guide walks through robots-aware site discovery, bounded one-page-at-a-time indexing, local project storage, and passage search from the Novus Hub.
- Open-access papers. A new research-paper guide covers Europe PMC search, DOI and PMID entry, open full text versus abstract-only projects, evidence links, and article attribution.
Polish pass: dictionary, downloads, video, and the new blog
- Dictionary now explains phrases and terms. When a phrase like “raster image” or a named method isn't a dictionary word, Novus Learn now falls back to a short encyclopedic explanation from Wikipedia: spelling-tolerant, source-cited, with a link to open the full topic.
- Printable flashcard answer key. Flashcards can now be downloaded as a printable Markdown answer key (prompt, answer, and source), alongside the existing Anki/Quizlet CSV.
- On-device video transcription fix. Fixed the speech-model loading error so caption-less videos can be transcribed on your device again. Nothing is uploaded.
- New blog and this changelog. Launched the Novus Learn blog with guides and product notes, plus this public changelog so you can follow what's new.
Teacher Hub, richer visuals, and more file formats
- Teacher Hub. Turn any topic into an editable, printable lesson plan and handout: objectives, a timed teaching plan, a worksheet with an answer key, and a slide outline, with separate student and teacher copies.
- Advanced visuals and a present mode. New diagram types (hierarchy, labeled systems, scale) and a full-screen presentation mode for staged visuals.
- PDF, EPUB, and Word uploads. Uploads now accept PDF, EPUB, and Word documents in addition to text and Markdown, all parsed in your browser and broken down chapter by chapter.
On-device video and code learning
- Video breakdowns. Drop in captions or a raw video/audio file; on-device transcription turns it into a source-grounded study set.
- Learn to code. Guided programming-language paths that cite the official docs, plus tools to X-ray a codebase and run JavaScript snippets in a sandbox.
Ask, connect, and explore
- Ask a topic. Ask any topic a question in your own words and get an answer assembled only from the source's real sentences: with evidence links, or an honest “not answered”.
- Unified command palette. A global ⌘K / Ctrl-K hub that searches topics, your local library, and the dictionary in one place.
- Free-resource sections. Every overview links out to open courses, books, textbooks, and how-to guides for the topic, keyless and tracking-free.
Novus Learn launches
- Source-grounded study, no account. Search any public Wikipedia topic and get a full study experience (summary, notes, flashcards, quiz, knowledge canvas, guided lesson, and visuals) all built from the article's real text, all stored on your device.