Here in Shanghai we have been dealing with a March of crazy weather - from snow to sandstorms to big temperature changes - and we are all eager for Spring to finally arrive. Here are some things to look for in April:

New Dashboard Concept

We will be updating the post-login Home page on the site. The big goal here is to start segmenting our  global classroom of Chinese-students into smaller groups. John has spent quite a bit of time over the past few months soliciting feedback from the community and talking with actual users on how to best do this. A quick note up front, for those students who like things the way they are now rest assured you will be able to continue to receive the new ChinesePod lessons as they are published much like the current My Lessons page.

For those who want more focus, you will be able to join level-specific groups (e.g. The Newbie Group), community groups (e.g. SF ChinesePod Users Group) and class groups (e.g. CPod Virtual School). Each of these groups will have their own specific courses and discussion boards. We will be consolidating the current My Lessons, Activity and Counseling pages into this new Dashboard.

Expect a few more posts on this in the coming weeks.

Dialect Series

There was a lot of positive feedback around Catherine's post last month for New Lesson ideas - especially for the dialects! Catherine will follow-up with more details with what she has planned on April 12th.

ChinesePod API & Developer Resources

We have been getting a lot of good feedback from developers in the ChinesePod community. We will be rolling out a number of developer resources in April and should also have the first draft of a project requirements document complete and available for community review. I am a big believer in open platforms and am personally chuffed that we are now getting the opportunity to do this. Look for this April 19th.

ChinesePod Partners & Teacher Resources

A big beneficiary of the new dashboards will be our Teacher Service (i.e. Guided, Executive, Virtual School) students. We have more than a thousand of such classes and the current user experience is in need of improvements. With the upcoming change, both students and teachers will have customized dashboards that will have all their lessons and conversations in one convenient location.

We haven't talked about it much publicly yet, but the ChinesePod team is working to formalize a “ChinesePod Method” to properly introduce our pedagogical approach and provide more suggestions on how to best use the various tools and services on ChinesePod. One point that keeps coming up in all of our discussions is the importance of integrating the lessons, study tools and interactions with a teacher. We believe all three are necessary to make progress with learning Chinese, but also recognize that many of you have your teachers with their own approaches to teaching the language. We are very confident in the effectiveness of our ChinesePod Method and would like to present it as an option for third-party Chinese teachers. As a result, all of the teaching resources we use with our own ChinesePod teachers will be opened up over the next few months. Third-party teachers will have full access to creating their own private classes on ChinesePod and assigning courses from the archive of 1400+ lessons. Their students will then be able to take advantage of the study tools and social collaboration on ChinesePod while still being able to study with the teacher they like best!

We are envisioning the Teacher Service component of the ChinesePod Method to include as a spectrum from ChinesePod-provided at one end to an open network of third-party teachers at the other. The logical extension of this approach is to continue to open up the ChinesePod service to community user groups and Chinese schools around the globe as well. We will be launching a ChinesePod Partner program in a few months to provide better service to these partners.

Changing Role for John

John Pasden will be changing his role at ChinesePod in April. The public side of his role, namely in lesson production and hosting, will remain EXACTLY the same, but he will transition out of some of the more, behind-the-scenes, instructional design activities of his job. Instead, he will be spending time on a new venture - AllSet Learning - a boutique consultancy on how to better learn Chinese. I am sure he will have many more details on this in the coming days. I love to see this entrepreneurial energy and it is a great opportunity for ChinesePod as well, since AllSet Learning will be our first official ChinesePod Partner. I greatly respect John's abilities and am sure his demanding Partner requirements will make it even a better program for those Partners who follow after him.

Thanks for all your support and feedback!

Hank.