Creating Online Lessons and PDF Transcripts (Easy HOWTO)

[trevelyan]

We've had a couple of threads over the last year or two asking about tools for creating Chinese PDFs, tagging MP3 files, and/or complaining about the cost or unavailability of good transcripts for various podcasts and programs.

Because of this, I thought it might be a good idea to share this video we've just made of the lesson creation system at Popup Chinese. The video is about six minutes long and shows how anyone can create online lessons (including transcripts, quizzes, pdfs and text files) in just a few minutes. The platform handles the hard parts and leaves us with the fun and creative bits:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkwZn1vYCBo

It isn't shown in the video, but there are a lot of small things that really make this great for lesson producers. My personal favourite touch is having all uploaded MP3 files id3tagged with the lesson transcript and lesson photo data. This makes it a snap to deliver really professional content through iTunes or Google Reader (just give someone your RSS feed). It's a snap to download the content and distribute it otherwise as well.

We're still working on feedback from early users and plan to stay in beta for the next 2 weeks. If anyone would like a courtesy premium account in the meanwhile, they can still get one by visiting http://popupchinese.com/voucher and entering the voucher number 2008AOYUN, although the clock *is* ticking....

[Konrad]

Wow, this is really cool! I don't think I'll be creating any lessons soon, but I'm going to forward this to a few people who just might.

Cheers,

Konrad