Lesson Discovering

While we will be publishing a new lesson every day of the week, most people will find studying lessons in this order awkward with the levels and subject matter constantly changing. With more than 500 lessons in the archive, there should be more than enough to keep everyone very busy!

We have tried to support a number of different approaches in helping users find lessons amongst this mass:

1. Browse by levels
This is the default search method for the ‘Explore’ menu option. A brief description helps new users get a better understanding of what to expect from each level. Lessons in each level can be sorted by popularity (number of times bookmarked by the community), ranking (average community ranking) and date. Basic and Premium users have the added function of being able to ‘Bookmark’ lessons they are interested in for future study.

2. ‘Stumbling upon’ via topic, function and grammar tags
While we believe guidance is important in learning languages, we also feel flexibility to ’self-discover’ relevant language is an important part of ‘Learning on Your Terms’. To support this, for each lesson we provide multiple tags or labels for the topics, functions and grammar of each lesson. If you liked a lesson tagged with ‘Olympics’, you can click on this link to find all other lessons with a similar tag.

3. Keyword search
At the top right of every page is a search box. Keywords entered will be matched against lesson titles, descriptions, vocabulary and tags to help find the best matches. After the initial search, most advanced search options will be presented:

4. Grouping via Lesson Sets
To add a bit more guidance as to what lessons to study, we will continue our use of Lesson Sets, which contain 10-12 lessons that could be grouped together and studied in sequence. Basic and Premium users will also be able to ‘Bookmark’ these.

Lesson Management

Basic and Premium subscribers will have a number of additional features to help them manage their Bookmarked lessons.

1. Study Schedule
Once lessons are bookmarked, they will be added to the Study Schedule page and will be available for scheduling. Study Schedule is very similar to the current My Course section where lessons can be saved and put in various folders. Instead of folders, Study Schedule utilizes a series of Calendars, much like Google Calendar. We have switched to a calendar format because we found that lesson pacing is important to not consume too much, or too little at once. In addition, if you have a Chinese teacher, they can pre-design a schedule that you can save with one-click and the appropriate lessons will appear in your iPod on the appropriate day.

2. Your Feed
In the current site, you can not only subscribe to the public RSS feed with the new lessons, but also to your My Course RSS. We will continue with this functionality and add more features. First of all, instead of using an obscure id number, we will institute a unique username system. Personal RSS feeds will look like: http://chinesepod.com/hankhorkoff/lessons/feed. On the Your Feed page you will be able to control the settings for your feed, specifying what types of programs you would like to receive and also what format of MP3’s you prefer.

3. Lesson List
For users that are a uncomfortable with accessing the downloads from the RSS feed, there will also be an HTML version that will reflect the same lesson information as the feed.