Rating lessons

Add this to the top of my ChinesePod wish list -- the ability to edit posts and comments after you've hit the GO! button. The lack of double spaces between the paragraphs up there is just grating on me. Grrrrrr.

Personally, after hearing everyone's feedback, I really think that the ratings could be useful when coupled with the tags. Let's use an example: I'm an Elementary learning on the edge of Intermediate. I want to better express myself in terms of what I like and don't like. The lessons are pretty well tagged in regards to content. There's even a tag for "feelings," so let's say I start there. But just clicking on that tag still leaves me in the woods. How can I find the lessons that other people have found really useful? This is where the ratings could come in really handy. If I could sort by lesson rating and then difficulty level, I'd find a nice tight group of great lessons aimed specifically on the topic I want, and right at my difficulty level. How's that for learning on my terms? :-)

Example: If I go to google in an hour or so, and search for "judge the lesson", or "risk taking is inhibited", this page will probably pop up near the top, despite those phrases being fairly commonly used. And if I do the same thing in five years time, I might get a similar result. Too bad if I made some terribly misleading error which was not corrected until 100 posts further down.

Frank, I added the paragraph breaks in, just for you. :) Users really should be able to edit/delete their own comments/posts...

Frank, But to address your original question... We always pay attention to users' reactions to lessons, and while comments and e-mails are perhaps weighted most heavily in our evaluations, the rankings lessons receive also play a role. If we want to encourage users to rank lessons more, we need to make the results of the ranking much more obvious. We could do this by displaying average rank only AFTER you rank (along with total number of users that have ranked that lesson, perhaps). We do have plans for this.

I have been using Chinesepod almost since it began, and I don't even know how to rate a lesson. But as long as we are talking about ratings, I give the Zhang Liang and Lili soap opera my highest ratings. The vocabulary is great, grammar points are plentiful, sentence structure is challenging, the common everyday usage is superior, and who doesn't like a soap opera? Can you please bring them back? Luke and Laura on General Hospital came back. Can't Zhang Liang and Lili? If you are new to Chinesepod, this story is a piece of Chinesepod history that you should pull out from the lesson archives.

I support the request for better tools for editing comments, I already asked for a preview option in another comment thread, and an ability to edit posts after they have been posted would also be good thing. I am not sure how we should use the rating system, it feels like a blunt instrument. There are lots of aspects to whether a lesson is good or bad : The vocabulary is interesting/the vocabulary is too difficult; Interesting grammar/too difficult grammar; The subject is Interesting: The banter is hard to understand; and so on.... And above all, whether a lesson is good or bad for you does not only depend on the lesson, but also on you. This is partly taken care of by the system of labeling lessons ar elementary/intermediate etc, but I think that we learners are all different, and a one parameter system cannot catch that aspect. I consider myself on advanced level for reading, but only on intermediate level for listening. So a lesson that is "good for me" would probably not also be good for someone who is advanced in listening, but intermediate in reading. One could argue that one should follow the majority vote to decide what is good. This is often a good idea, but I think that it is not a good idea on CPod. There is a huge corpus of lectures in the archive, so it is not really necessary that every lesson is good for everyone. There are lots of lessons to choose from for everyone. I believe that a lesson doesn't have to be good for all of the people all the time. If a lesson is good for some of the people some of the time, it is valuable. But that lesson might get a bad average ranking. Now I'll add this comment, but when i have done so, I will probably find five spelling error in it.

While I am at it... I can' see the logic in hiding the average rank of a lesson until you have voted. If the ranking system improves, a lot of students might want to see the average rank of a lesson before they study that lesson. In order to do so, they would have to rank the lesson before they have studied it... not good.

Talking about those soap operas... I keep thinking one day I'll pull them out and study them in sequence, because I didn't study the lessons at the time they came through and I don't want to go out of sequence, or, heaven forbid, miss an episode! I think the diary ones and the recent spooky ones have their own tag which makes it easy if it's consistently applied, but I wasn't able to bring up a list for the original Zhang and Lili ones. Any suggestions? Now that I look, I'm totally confused about those popularity and ranking numbers. What do they mean? Like, is a big number good or bad, is a small number good or bad? Oh, I've been given an answer to that before, lost somewhere in these chats, but how am I going to remember which way round it is? Maybe if there was a one-liner available to everyone, explaining (roughly) how they're derived, it would make sense and stick for next time.

Here they are, Auntie Sue! A Fated Meeting How was your date? Growing Affections The Jealous Friend Lover's Spat Love Letter An Old Flame A Guy's Advice on Women Scheming Girls The Come-on The Other Woman Confiding in a Conniving Friend The Break-up Seeking Comfort A Dad's Advice to a Broken-Hearted Son The Uncomfortable Encounter in a Bar It's Over It's Over (Again) Hope you enjoy learning them as much as I do!

That's one of the main reasons I prefer the Forum. Learners need to be free to make mistakes, AND fix them, especially when they know that other learners will be taking it all on board. Consider, if someone stuck a microphone in front of you during dinner or at the pub and told you whatever you say will be on the evening news and then archived on the net for all time, you wouldn't feel like relaxing too much and taking risks. Well, you can't learn without being prepared to take risks, that's a known part of the learning process, and for me risk taking is inhibited when we do not have ownership and control of our own words. No, I tend not to rate lessons, it's kinda fallen off my radar, and I'm a bit unsure about what the rankings and ratings are supposed to mean. There are some, though, that I'd really like to mark as extra good.

Dave's got the right idea. Really, they're just a consumer feedback tool.

tvan, I actually see them as being equally useful to us, the user! If a healthy number of the students rated the lessons consistently, we could sort search results by popularity and find lessons that other users found particularly useful. It could actually make it a more democratic process. I liken it reading reviews on Amazon. Those heavily influence my buying decisions. The product owner can put all the snazzy marketing copy they want on the thing, but if the customers trash it, they don't get my money. Or, in this case, time.

Oh, and thanks, John! I appreciate it!

Thanks very much for the list, weixiao! Now I'm going to be naughty and follow on an off topic sub-thread, because I don't want to start a new one. You see, I don't know how to do ANYTHING with formatting or linking in this environment, and there's no docs, so I'm going to try a YouTube for the first time. Of course if it bombs out I can't fix its URL and try again, but hey, I don't own this page. The remarks above about wishing for the ability to edit are heartfelt by some, and inconsequential to many others. It comes down to different philosophies, how you see yourself, this place, the relationship between them. For example, I've never liked blogs, for me they epitomise everything the net has grown away from, yet few agree with me, and that's fine, the community I'm operating in thinks blogs are the ultimate communication method these days, so be it. But I couldn't resist showing you this: :-)

My thread has been bushwacked! Hijacked, even! :-)

Sorry Frank :-) It's just that the edit interface is completely different when you start a new topic, and, well... Ratings are cool. We should use them more, but we don't use them enough yet. We should know more about how to use and interpret them, then we will. Aunty is a bushwacker. I've finished. Take it back, Frank.

I beg to differ Aunty, Ratings are not cool, not if they are just numbers. The right question is not if a lesson is good or bad, the right question is "is it good or bad for me" (see my previous post) . We need a more differentiated system of ratings to answer that more important question.

marcelbdt, how would you implement that? Personally, I rely more upon the topic than the ratings when going through old lessons, but maybe that's just me. Frank, the reason I regard ratings as more of a consumer feedback tool is precisely because they are hidden. This avoids prejudicing future comments based upon prior results. However, your point on usefulness to the Cpod consumer is well taken. On the other thread, I knew the shooter missed Kennedy, but I didn't think Nixon still lived.

I'm all for the revamping of the rating system so I can trash the lessons I hate and show my love for the good ones in a way where I can see the full impact of the wrath of David.