A quick comment on the logic here. We got caught up in a bit of the long-term vision of the product here. The Calendar system was originally designed where named calendars would replace named folders in version 2. This would preserve all the functionality in version 2, but add the extra value of the pacing of lessons (by you or a teacher) in a custom personal feed. Faced, with accelerated project deadlines, we were forced to cut some functionality - specifically, multiple named calendars like you would find in Google Calendar. The unintentional result of this was a loss of version 2 functionality and a drop in usability.
While I still believe there is a lot of potential in a calendar system to help navigate and organize lessons (think of the difference between a to do list and a calendar), we have added back a ‘Bookmarked Lessons’ page to make lesson management much easier in the short-term.
We only have a small team of developers here in Shanghai, but we have tried to be very aggressive with our product development. Sometimes the vision of what we hope to achieve gets ahead of us. I would be interested in hearing perspectives on the difference between managing lessons via a list versus a calendar as this is something I would like to develop going forward.
Hank.
中文 Chinese
Paul Says:
April 17th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
For myself, I prefer managing my lessons through a list, or multiple lists, with each list consisting of lessons encompassing a common theme. This is similar to what you already have in the “canned” Lesson Sets, except I, the user, get to define the lessons and the themes.
I make the most progress in my Chinese studies via repetition. A lesson list that is not tied to a specific calendar date facilitates repetitive learning.
Anne M. Says:
April 17th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Ken, a calendar has definitely a lot of potential. My favourite solution would be named lists (as many as I want, similar to the V2 concept) combined with one (or more) calendars, where I can drag and drop lessons from a list to a schedule or from the schedulde back to a named list.
I usually organize my lessons in categories like “sounds interesting”, “did it once, should repeat it sometimes”, “studied parts of it” and so on. These are much more lessons than I can handle in a calendar. But a calendar is great for handling the actual chunks.
Thanks for helping out so quickly. The “select all/none” thing was crucial
A longtime premium subscriber Says:
April 17th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
I second Paul’s sentiment.
I tend to listen to five to seven podcasts a week and since V3 came online, I haven’t done a single new podcast, mostly because my lists were fused into one huge 300 item long unmanageable list on the calendar page!
One thing that I haven’t seen in the last two posts and that is sorely missing, specially for those who have already gone over a poscast or two (or 200), is the NUMBERING. I cannot understate just how lost among the lessons I feel without it. For me and, from what I’ve read in the last few days, many other users, this was one of the most basic tools for progress tracking and site navigation.
This is probably the single most important functionality loss in switching to V3. I think most of the “heavy” users really miss this.
Frank Says:
April 17th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Hank - Thanks to you and your team for responding so quickly to the wants and needs of your customers. That’s awesome.
My only other wish for the bookmarked list is to allow us to control the number of lessons per page that show up there. Right now we’re limited to 10. I have a mere 143 lessons in my bookmarked list. I’d have to scroll through as many as 13 pages before I found the one I was looking for. Perhaps a pull-down option to allow us to see 10, 25, 50 or ALL lessons per page? (And allow us to set that as the default option for return visits!)
I swear I would do cartwheels while juggling flaming batons if you could make this happen!
V3 progress; Hank’s post at ChinesePod Blog Mandarin Mutterings with Frank Fradella Says:
April 18th, 2007 at 12:22 am
[...] address and several hundred vitriolic posts to answer, I think they’re doing a fantastic job. Hank’s post this morning about adding that Bookmarked list is just another example of a great team hard at [...]
Paul Dillon Says:
April 18th, 2007 at 5:48 am
My 2 cents:
Lists: This was a really useful tool for me. I had 3 lists. The first one was my list of practice lessons with Aggie. The second was my list of lessons that I was studying as a supplement to the practice lessons. The third was a list of completed lessons. The lists helped me to organize and monitor my own personalized learning program.
Numbered lessons: Also useful to me. First and foremost useful as an organizing tool on my iPod. Secondarily, the first 50 Newbie lessons are a nice linear progression of basic Mandarin. My own thoughts are that Newbie’s need a structured progression at first. Once a base has been established then they can self select from a topical/functional menu of lessons. Perhaps only the Newbie lessons need to be numbered, and not elementary and onwards.
Schedule: This has some potential. Some of my learning is easy to schedule. For example, my practice sessions with Aggie can be neatly scheduled. For the most part,however, most of my learning is tough to schedule. I will work on one lesson until I am ready to move on to another. Some lessons are easy for me and I will spend only one day. Other lessons are more challenging and may take me 2 or 3 days.
Perhaps you can have both lists and schedules? And perhaps numbers can be turned on or off depending on user preferences? This may be a lot to program. I don’t know. I’m a “learning guy”, not a technical guy!
Monika Says:
April 18th, 2007 at 7:25 am
THANKS!
andy Says:
April 18th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
V3 sucks. All I want to do is log in every few days, listen to a couple of lessons in the past days and look at the dialogue sheet for each lesson.
so it seems that I have to search the lessons, somehow schedule them, and then… I do’t know what…. at leat that’s what I think I have to do…. I havne’t asctually figured out what to do yet.
I will log on again in a few days.. hopefull something has gotten simpler.
The new V3 seriously sucks ass. what happened to the simplicity and friendliness of the old site? it almost seems that this site is only usefull for those premium subscribers who use this site as their sole or main source of languge study, doing all the excercises, filing grammar points, schedulling stuff….
is that the user demographic?
Marc Says:
April 18th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Andy,
I am sorry but I don’t get it. Just sign in, then hit the ‘Explore’ link on your home page and all the lessons are still there. There seems to be a misconception about the need to schedule lessons. This is a feature and it is not compulsory. You can still access every lesson directly from the ‘Explore’-pages. The link to the PDF file is right there on the first page of every lesson.
Cornelia Says:
April 18th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
What with the files that I cannot include into my personal feed??
Yes, I am again talking of the pure-dialogue-mp3s.
They could be such a marvellous new V3-feature but currently seem to be treated as unbeloved orphans…
They have identical titles as the full-lesson-mp3s, but it should be indicated that they are DIALOGUES only. In a place which is easily viewable on an iPod, so latest after the level. What I currently manually edit: put DIA in between level and hyphon for content-title.
Then they should be identically ID3-tagged as the full-lesson-mp3s, i.e. including Hanzi Pinyin English. BTW I have never found Pinyin: is it really supposed to be there or was this a premature hopeful announcement of John? This copying of full-lesson-podcast-description into pure-dialogue lyrics (as nothing else is available, because this mp3 currently is no “podcast” in iTunes) is the next manual step for me, and a pretty superfluous one that adds no value to my learning process.
We should be able to customize which mp3-files we want to include into our personal feeds. For some that could be pure-dialogue for lower levels and both for current level, either for having easy review means or for repeated-background-listening to gain repetition for memorizing. In lower levels you just check if you comprehend everything or if more in-depth learning might be advisable.
Whereas the inclusion of the PDFs into my iTunes-feed is useless for me: as the copy-issue has never been properly solved I do not need the PDF at all, I just go to the workaround-HTML-website from where I can copy. Because what I really need is a file into which I can type, so if the included document would be a word doc that would be useful (but then I understand that you do not want to promote one special word processing software).
I need to put a word-by-word translation underneath the pinyin in order to render the different sentence structure of Chinese transparent to me and derive sentence patterns to reapply for own phrases – Birkenbihl approach. This step I do not complain about, but it is not superfluous but part of my learning. (It could be done centrally for all, but I am clear that the Birkenbihl approach has only some 80% overlap with CPod’s approach.) The prerequisite is just having copyable content delivered.
The pure-dialogue-mp3s are a nice beginning, but without these obvious issues solved you need to understand that we do not yet sing the song of the songs about your achievements here.
Cornelia Says:
April 18th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Sorry - my last post belongs to the other thread about “personal feed options”…
SallyBR Says:
April 20th, 2007 at 6:18 am
Another pretty lost user here…
I don t want to whine and won t - like others, I will give it some time and try again and again to get used to the new system
But for the past three days I’ve been trying to find my way through the old lessons, which I had organized by numbers and not titles - and it is a bit frustrating.
ooops, was that a whine?
