Lesson Meta-data

Right now, there is a 5-star ranking system for us the users to rank lessons. It doesn't seem to be used much. Perhaps CPOD can automatically rank lessons according to some measure of popularity, such as, number of times the lesson is downloaded. Thanks !

User tagging as advocated elsewhere. Furthermore, we'd like to be able to not only search for lessons, but for user comments, too. I'd really appreciate this.

My biggest issues with the current meta-data are consistency and searchability. Right now, if you go to the Search page, the list of values for topic and function are not well organized. Mainly, these values should be consolidated into a smaller group of tags. For example, there are two shopping tags, "business/shopping" and "shopping", which seem redundant. Plus some tags are in Chinese while others are in English. Also, grammar tags seem to be included with the function tags but I think they should be separated out. Also, I think it would be helpful if tags were organized into a hierarchy in order to find and search on them more efficiently. For example, you could decide that the top-level tags for topic are: business, entertainment, traveling, culture, grammar etc. Underneath, the entertainment tag could be tags for sports, movies, music etc. You can create a similar hierachy for the function tags. With a hierarchical list of tags, you could change the Search page to display the tags as such which would make them easier to find than the current approach of one long list in a drop-down box. Thus searching would consist of navigating to the appropriate tag while also supply additional filtering by category. The category drop-down should be changed to a series of check-boxes so you can search across multiple categories ("give me all sports-related Newbie AND Elementary lessons"). In answering your question, I think before new lesson meta-data is introduced, this refinement of the current tags and Search screen needs to take place in order to 1) make the current tags that we do have more usable and 2) provide a design to accommodate future meta-data.

I totally agree with boran. I have found that searching for a particular subject very unreliable. Please first sort that out.

I would like to have a meta-data to follow some of the voice-actors.

I'd agree to tidying up tags, you have different entries for 'expressing_opinions' and 'expressing_ opinions' (extra space)... even 'expressing_opinionse', you have tags such 'informing / buying / persuading /' or 'asking_questions / complaining /' which should really be multiple tags. What you also need is to indicate 'dialog(ue)' as well as 'series', most but not all lessons are dialogues, you also need 'series', by definition not every one will know of Jiang Liang or the Beauty Pageant... Finally, you need a smarter search interface, alllowing booleans ('not series', 'food or travel'). Also consistency as well as tolerance : you have 'teaching' as a different tag from 'education', but a text search for teach does not necessarily match the former tag.

@paulc, Ratings are used, but they are of most help for those navigating through the archive, rather than following the daily lesson flow. Right now, we are using 'Bookmarking' as a proxy for popularity. The lessons lists display both numbers. @Joachim, We are looking at user tagging for personal use at the moment and shying away from public use because we are wary of creating more confusion. Right now, we already have Topic, Function and soon Grammar tags to help users 'wayfind' through the archive. As for search, it is clearly a priority. Right now, there is a need to search for lessons, for words, for conversations and for users. Each of these are on different technical platforms and are not very easy to integrate. Our CTO, Eric Lee, and our Research Director, David Lancashire, are working on this right now.

hankfdh, again I'm not sure your Topic, Function tags are much help. In addition to being very inconsistent, they are not searchable outside the pull-down menus (unlike the way I present them. Unfortunately, your post does not seem to correlate with the ongoing practice as these recent examples show : Lesson D0839 Saved by the Gong: Math class has 'Saved_by_the_Gong_Series' when it should really have 'Series' as a separate tag. (if you are talking future use with 1-2000 lessons chances are not everyone will think of the Gong amongst other series). Lesson E0841 六一儿童节 has no 'interview' tag when it's one of 3 such special lessons.