We are all back from the Chinese New Year break and are eager to roll out our next set of projects for ChinesePod. To share what we are working on this month:

Lesson Production

ChinesePod's new lesson production has been a hot topic of discussion for many years now. Recently, we have been debating a number of approaches moving forward. Should we design a comprehensive corpus of lessons to teach all aspects of the language or should lesson design be more "magazine-like" focusing on timely topics at an academic level matching the majority of our students? We don't have an obvious answer to this debate and would like to open up the conversation. Catherine Mathes will publish a blog post on March 8th to kick off this discussion.

Grammar Guide

John Pasden will publish a blog post previewing this feature and soliciting early feedback on March 15th 17th.

Mobile Apps

In February, we rolled out support for traditional characters on the iPhone. Since smart phones store downloaded lesson data locally we also added the ability  to delete this local lesson data and audio files to make it easier to manage what is stored on the phone's SD card. We have set aside one developer day a week (for both iPhone and Android) to fix bugs and add new features (this is why there are such frequent updates to these apps). Please continue to send us your feedback and ideas.

Public API's

For the developers out there, in March we will kick off the development process for our ChinesePod public API. The overarching design principle we are taking with this is that if it can be done on our iPhone or Android apps it should be available in the API. With so many platforms (e.g. Windows, Palm, etc) to support hopefully the developer community will help us out a bit here. Since our tech team is mostly Chinese speakers, I will help out with the communication between them and our developer community. Expect a blog post on March 22nd to kick this off.

New Student & Teacher Dashboards

John Pasden has been busy testing new ways to make study management and interaction with teachers easier. He will publish a blog post on March 29th with many more details.

Finally, there has been some discussion about what has happened to Ken Carroll. Ken left China in November 2009 and continued to help out remotely with ChinesePod until the end of January 2010. No one at Praxis Language is really in a position to speak for him and I am sure he will tell his story when he is ready. We wish him the best.

Hank

Update: If you have any further questions about Ken please use your valid email address in the comments so that I can contact you directly. Thanks.