October has been a relatively quiet month for changes to ChinesePod. We’re not just taking a break and enjoying the beautiful Shanghai autumn weather, though; we’ve been hard at work on the platform behind the scenes. I’ll fill you in a bit now on what we’ve been doing.
Development Updates
We mentioned a while back that we switched to a new AMS (Academic Management System). A few glitches aside, the transition went smoothly, but the ChinesePod site you see didn’t change much, except for a few things like PDFs for Qing Wen.
Following the transition to the new AMS, we’ve been doing a lot of work to get our data in better order (which enables us to do more with it), and to improve and streamline the lesson creation process (which makes work more enjoyable and efficient for our hard-working staff). We’ve made tremendous progress on this front, but the improvements are not visible to ChinesePod users. Nevertheless, it was essential development that is nearly complete.
One of the other new features enabled by the new AMS is the new exercises. While most users have felt they are a huge improvement over the previous ones from a usability and study perspective, there are also more “behind the scenes” changes that went into the new exercises. The new exercises organize exercise data and results in a more modular, extensible way. This means we can:
- Generate new exercises more easily
- Add new exercise types more easily
- Create “quizzes” (similar to exercises, but incorporating data from multiple lessons, and possibly new questions and/or new question types)
- Create placement tests (replacement for the listening test)
- Create level tests (how would you fare on a test of all Intermediate lessons, with content randomly selected?)
Testing does not excite everyone, but it does provide one very valuable piece of information: an indicator of progress. ChinesePod is working hard on a better system for organizing lessons, presenting courses, and tracking learner progress. The new system is much better equipped to handle the “testing” aspect. (Obviously a lot of other work is needed as well, particularly on the lesson organization and presentation front.)
Community
The ChinesePod community is widely recognized as one of ChinesePod’s biggest strengths, but also one of its major weaknesses. You have told us that the Community section is not organized well, that it’s hard to find the information you’re looking for. We are listening, and we want to work with you, the users, to improve the ChinesePod Community section.
One complaint we have had is that it’s not immediately obvious which commenters are ChinesePod employees, or even which ones are the same people you hear in the podcasts. This will change next week, as each ChinesePod employee’s comments all over the site will be clearly labeled, and also linked to a “ChinesePod Team” page where you can see a list of the ChinesePod hosts, teachers, and support staff, both current and past.
We’ll also be adding a new “reputation” system for users, which helps identify the biggest contributors, the most helpful commenters, and most veteran users, etc. There’s a good amount of research available already, such as in this Yahoo overview, and we’re going over it all. It’s still in development, and we’re open to new ideas. We’d love to hear your input.
The biggest question, of course, is overall community organization. Staff identification and a user reputation system are nice, but they don’t solve the bigger problem: how to better organize your community content. Here are some of the things we’re hearing:
- The search isn’t good enough; I can’t find certain discussions even when I’m pretty sure they’re there.
- With no history or bookmarking features, I find it hard to find useful discussions again.
- The discussions are too chaotic. We need threaded comment discussions like most forums have.
- Group discussions are too buried; they need to be made more central.
- Lesson discussions are often way too off-topic to be useful. I need help finding the content that helps me learn.
- The community discussion often feels like a clique. I don’t feel comfortable commenting.
- Lesson discussion, even on Newbie lessons, is way too advanced. I don’t feel comfortable commenting.
We have some ideas for ways to tackle these problems (some pointed out by astute users in the past), but I don’t want to influence your responses too much, so I’d like to hear some of your ideas on how to improve the community before continuing the discussion on some of the options we have.
Thank you, ChinesePod community, for your help, your feedback, and your support. We will keep moving ChinesePod toward the better service we all know it can be.
pretzellogic on 
Andrew Cockerham on 
Dave on
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Very glad to hear this news! I’m a relatively new member of CPod, but I love the service and have been touting it to everyone I know, in part because of this responsiveness from the powers that be. Thank you for the time and effort you’re putting in behind the scenes as well as in keeping us informed.
For feedback purposes, I would definitely be interested in the testing. I’m learning toward a specific goal (a trip to China next spring), and I’m an achievement-driven person, anyway.
Placement tests, quizzes, level tests — it all sounds good. I want to know how well I’m doing and where I need to work harder. (I should also say that I’m enjoying the new and improved exercises. They’re a lot of fun and feel like they’re testing me more than the old versions.)
I also agree with the last three points about the community content. I don’t read Mandarin characters too well yet, so often by the time I’ve deciphered the first comments in a discussion, it has already moved rapidly on, either on topic or, as noted, off it. I feel discouraged and intimidated about even trying to join in, particularly in threads where two or three users seem to be talking amongst themselves. Such are the internets, I know, and you can never (and probably should never) police against it . . . but a little more breathing space for newbies would be quite, quite welcome. I’d also like threaded discussions and more pinyin use in Newbie and Elementary lesson discussions.
Thanks again, and I look forward to seeing what comes next!
I have been studying Chinese for a couple years and can read pretty well. I sympathize with Cameron’s comments. It is frustrating to be in the dark because you can not read the comments. Is there any way to mouse over characters and at least give the pinyin if not the definition? I am a student at a Chinese University. We have an absolutely appalling text book for our listening classes. The topics are sooooo dreary I struggle to keep awake. Have you considered developing a program that can be adapted to a higher learning institution?
Keep up the great work. I am very proud of you all and all you have accomplished in the 3 years I have been following Chinese pod.
Mary Ann in Southern China
Good news:
1 testing does interest me, if only as a way of giving me a sense that i am progressing. but this needs to be testing across reading, listening, writing and speaking. of course some of that is easier than other.
2 on the community… i don’t find the clique-iness (if that is a word) too bothersome, since often the responders are praising the contribution of other podders. what i find bad are the following features of the community – (a) discussion dies after a week or two, so someone coming back to a lesson several months after it was delivered finds it hard to generate any further discussion; (b) it is difficult to track all the discussions that are going on now across all the fields; (c) discussion is broken between lessons, blogs and other special interest locations. it seems to me that it would help to have a link on the ‘me’ page where all recent comments / questions could be listed for me to check them off daily, rather as i now check off lessons and the like. such a link would not move discussions from where they are now, but would make it easier for someone to find them.
good luck!
As someone who’s been posting on the cpod site for awhile, i’m happy to see comments like Cameron’s. I suspect there are more people who feel this way.
Please don’t be intimidated on the site. You paid your subscription money, and you’ve purchased the right to make the site suit your needs.
Cameron, FWIW, learn taxi lessons, if you haven’t already done so. Unless your trip to China is a guided tour, then nevermind.
Hello, as a newbie who is catching up on lessons, some 3 or more years old, I find that my questions on these old lessons aren’t answered. I’m looking forward to the tests also as I like to get an idea of how good/bad I’m doing with CPod.
John,
My feedback:
Recognization of Cpod team members and their roles/responsibilities is essential and certainly long-time due. Glad it is becoming a reality soon.
Reputation system for users will be an effective means of improving the quality and credibility (index) of postings. Because the boards are a “community” and you really cannot control what poddies say (irrespective of written policies and a waste of management time spent in attempting to “big brother” the boards), self regulation is the answer to improve community contents.
Threaded comments is a must! It’s quite surprising that this proven feature at many other discussion sites has not been implemented at Cpod right right from the start. Threaded posts will solve the problem of so-called annoyance at clique postings. Don’t like to read the postings of a group of friends (deemed a clique”) chatting away, don’t click on a member’s initial post.
At every level of Chinese learning, there can be complains of “I’m put off by not understanding Chinese postings, or intimidated by these postings.” Even at Intermediate or Upper Intermediate levels, certain postings of natives can be too difficult to completely comprehend. It is a bad policy to pamper newbies or eles by insisting that chinese characters should be accompanied by pinyin – this policy hampers learning growth via self help, as well as, discourages helpful insights in the postings of chinese natives. There is already more than enough learning content in the Cpod lessons themselves, and it is really not that necessary (nor guaranteed reliability) to depend on the community postings for more learning content.
To really improve the community content, Cpod needs to stop “sock puppets” from posting. Many disturbances this year were created by sock puppets using new aliases during the one week trial period to flame poddies. A few of these situations were exacerbated by Cpod management responding in support of a sock puppet’s comments. Surely Cpod’s computer control system can identify isp addresses used for abusive purposes.
In closing, I think it will be a greater win-win if Cpod gives priority to improving the quality of the teaching services than in attempting to control the community contents . A community is a community… how much can you control what they say, and will such control really result in attracting new subscriptions or retaining existing members?
Areas where I see improvements can be made in the teaching aspects are (1) value added comments and explanations (above and beyond the lesson trancripts) in the show podcasts (2) more emphasis on chinese grammar in the podcasts (3) less errors in the lessons materials i.e. more quality control checking (4) teaching poddies clear diction and rhythm in speaking chinese, for example, having a recording capability for poddies to compare their spoken Chinese to that of the teachers.
@Mary Ann, If you use the Firefox browser there is a free add in you can install called Chinese Perapera-kun which gives you pop translations whenever you mouse over characters, anywhere on the web:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349/
John, can you guys optimize the Glossary tool? That ‘s a *great* tool! It only returns about 20 results, though, no matter what. So if I want to look for shi4 (是) I get only a few results. Actually, at the top it says “no results found” even if it finds a few. Also, allow the users to request more sophisticated seaches, for example, shi4*de might return all the examples of the shi4…de pattern. MDBG.net has this feature and it’s great.
The Glossary also helps you guys because you can refer the users to it instead of having to field every “how to say…?” or “can we say …?” question (specially at my level, elementary and newbie). The best feature of nciku.com is all the usage examples it gives. Their database is from dictionaries, though, and the examples, unlike C-Pod’s, sometimes don’t seem like they would be high frequency enough. Even if they are, some of them are just too hard to understand for many of us. Using ChinesePod’s enormous database of 1,600+ lessons of *high-frequency* Chinese, you guys can have a really unique tool in your hands!
Thanks, all of you, for the great comments. Melbourne, Paulinurus, and Carlos, your specific suggestions/points are really good ones, and especially useful. Thank you for taking the time to post them. I’m really looking forward to taking care of these issues.
–John
Hi John,
I agree with the comment Carlos made regarding the Glossary feature, I think that could really be explanded. It has a lot of possibility, but at the moment is quite limited. If I search for a basic term, sometimes the only sentence examples that appear are Newbie sentences, whereas I am looking to see how the character can be used in more complex sentences. Also, I think it would be great if there was another column – maybe to the right of those little arrows you click on to listen to the sentence – that gaves you a direct link to the specific chinesepod lesson using that sentence.
I am also a very goal-driven person, and I think it would be great to have more testing opportunities on the web site. In addition to listening tests you could have grammar and vocab tests (i.e. picking out which sentence out of 4 choices is grammatically correct, etc.) and maybe a short paragraph to read and then a few comprehension questions. In fact that could even be worked into some kind of lesson, i.e. you could post a short paragraph/essay on monday for example, then annouce that a lesson discussing this paragraph will be given on wednesday.
I think Chinesepod is already hands-down the best website there is out there to learn chinese and with just a few improvements it could be even better. I am amazed at how quickly my chinese has improved in just the year and a half I have been studying. I tell everyone I know about this website, even if they aren’t studying chinese!
I listen to ChinesePod every day with but don’t have much time to comment on the discussion boards (wish I did). So I’m an active but invisible user. I think there are probably lots like me. When I’m online I can too easily be distracted by the medium. What helps me most and is most time-effective for me is listening, listening, and more listening–and then looking at the text on my iPod and then listening some more.
I agree with all of Paulinurus’ suggestions. The discussions can be improved with threaded comments, but it’s not necessary to regulate them more than you already do. It’s really a great community, at least what I’ve seen on the Intermediate+ levels. Put your limited time and considerable talents into the content of the lessons: more grammar, more examples, more exercises and tests. Consider adding another more in-depth grammar/structure/usage audio file to go along with the original lesson and vocab. review files.
Like Carlos, I’ve had a number of empty returns on the Glossary. I find other online dictionaries more useful.
I’d love to see more lesson sets. I have the most interest and learn the most from those. With 1500 or so lessons–sorry, I’ve lost count–it can be hard to decide exactly where to jump in and then to figure out where to go next. (Again, the medium of the site may be too distracting.) Creating more sets of lessons add structure to the huge number of lessons. Another advantage to lesson sets is that it would be easier and more natural to recycle specific vocabulary and patterns within those sets. I think more organized recycling of vocabulary and patterns would strengthen your method.
Also, how about more lessons in the narrative voice? Narrative voice is often used often in conversation, for instance just relating something funny that happened over the weekend. Being extended discourse, narratives give lots of practice in linking words and grammar (makes grammar more transparent through example) and then of course, there’s the recycling issue
There is a site which offers narratives on different difficulty levels (Prof. Tianwei Xie’s site). That is really useful and effective model for all the language skills (retell the barebones story, complicate it, add motivation, background, etc. etc.. ) It’d be fun too.
The above suggestion is a digression from the main topic but think of the possibilities of centering discussion groups around lesson sets of narratives! Expanding and retelling of narratives could be focused and productive community work. Sometimes there just isn’t much one can say about a short conversation.
Great, great site. I’m invisible but I tell everyone about you. Keep up the good work.
(Sorry for the multiple posting.)
As a long time user on the run the most useful part of the lessons is the audio review.
I strongly suggest you include audio pattern repetition drills. These are a tremendous help in inculcating good language habits
I have enjoyed the newbie lessons on my ipod shuffle. I love this method for language learning. One suggestion I would make is creating a condensed version of your podcast for the user who is listening to the same episode for the third or fourth time. Repetition is a key to language learning and sometimes (after the first listen through) I just want to jump right to the listening and the translation part.
Hi John,
Probably a little late commenting on this but I agree with some of the comments above – after spending all day on the computer at work, I tend to want a break in the evening – although the stuff on the site is useful, I find it hard to set aside a lot of time to use the site and the audio content is the main benefit of ChinesePod for me. So, like some of the others, I fall into the category of people who are active but don’t spend much time going through the comments. One feature of this – particularly as I am not necessarily doing the most recent lessons, is that by the time I do come to look at the comments the discussion has often moved on; I think this is the main reason why I do not often post. I don’t mind there being a bit of off topic chat.
In line with some of the earlier posters, for me the quality of the audio lessons and supporting audio tools is the main thing. One thing that I think might be useful is to split some of the lesson bands a bit now there are so many lessons as Intermediate lessons, for example, currently cover quite a large range of abilities. I would also welcome further audio based review tools.