The Grammar Guide, a project which has been in development at ChinesePod for some time, is about to see a number of welcome changes. A while back we did a total restructuring of our AMS (Academic Management System), the system we use to create lessons. This brought many exciting improvements to the lesson production process, but also created certain mandatory changes to the Grammar Guide on the backend. As we made those changes, we also took the opportunity to upgrade certain functionality. These tech changes are winding up this month.
So what have we been working on? Here is a list of some of the changes:
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Better linking. The core principle of the Grammar Guide design from the beginning was that lessons should link to grammar points in the Grammar Guide, and the Grammar Guide should link to relevant lessons. The exact implementation, however, can be tricky. We have redone this on the backend to make it easier to both add grammar tags to lessons, and to interlink Grammar Guide entry content.
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Better sample sentences. Until now, Grammar Guide sample sentences have had an inconsistent format, inconsistent annotations, and lack of support for traditional characters. By unifying the Grammar Guide “sample sentence” creation tools and the lesson “expansion sentence” creation tools on the backend, we’ve solved all these problems at once. This also makes it possible for our teachers to search through our vast repository of already-annotated sentences, and use those for the Grammar Guide (possibly with modification). This in particular will greatly speed up Grammar Guide content development.
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Better structure, better future. By reworking the Grammar Guide’s structure on the backend, we are making possible some exciting additions to our lesson content. Beyond mere information about grammar, the value of the Grammar Guide from a data perspective lies in all the interlinkages between grammar data and a huge archive of lesson data. With the new structure, not only is it easier to link everything together, but it’s also possible to pull grammar data into new places, such as exercises, tests, and lesson PDFs. Those are still a ways off, but they’re in the plans for 2010.
We are finishing up the backend changes to the Grammar Guide this month. Those changes required a pause in Grammar Guide content production, but in April it will resume. Our production manager, Catherine Mathes, will be telling us more about that in another blog post next month.
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