Hi everyone
A few months ago our Rocket Italian course was reviewed in PC Mag (read the full review here http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381636,00.asp). It was a great honor to receive the Editors Choice award from a company as respected as PC Mag. The Editors Choice award is given out to the best product in the category that they are reviewing, in our case language learning products.
While receiving the Editors Choice award was fantastic, the review also highlighted a few things that we needed to improve to make the course even better for language learners. Here are the major issues and what we have done to improve them;
1. Lack of Voice-recognition technology
Our Product Development and IT teams met about this straightaway and formed a plan to make a user-friendly voice recognition/comparison tool that would really help language learners get to grips with the accents and the rhythm of a language. Within a month or so we had a prototype up and running on Rocket French, and now I am delighted to say that we have added this feature (Rocket Record) to all of our language products. The feedback from current members has been tremendous and its proving a very useful tool for a lot of people, particularly those new to a language when it can be hardest to make sense of a spoken sentence in the foreign language. A big thanks to the Product Dev and IT teams for making such a great learning tool.
What’s next?
Right now the Product Development team is in the process of adding more audio to the courses so that Rocket Record can be used in more situations. There are already around a thousand audio tracks per course but soon there will be several thousand. This will give the learner a huge resource to use. What’s more is that we will be adding Rocket Record functionality to the free resources on our site. We have already done this with most of our French and Spanish resources. Try Rocket Record for yourself here;
http://www.rocketlanguages.com/french/learn/when-in-french-where-in-french/
http://www.rocketlanguages.com/spanish/learn/weather-in-spanish/
2. Horrendous online store:)
Ouch! Unfortunately as we use a 3rd party (ClickBank) to process our orders we have limited control over the things we can do. In saying that we have reviewed the system and recommended changes to them. We are hopeful that some significant changes will be made before the end of the year.
3. Horrendous free trial sign up:)
Ouch! Ouch! We have made changes here to let people have a clearer understanding of what is in the 6 day free trial. It is also on the cards that we will make this trial a 24/7 lifetime “lite” membership so that people can use the functionality whenever they like. If you want to experience a Rocket Languages course then you can sign up from these links;
Spanish http://www.rocketlanguages.com/spanish/
Korean http://www.rocketlanguages.com/korean/
Japanese http://www.rocketlanguages.com/japanese/
Italian http://www.rocketlanguages.com/italian/
Hindi http://www.rocketlanguages.com/hindi/
German http://www.rocketlanguages.com/german/
French http://www.rocketlanguages.com/french/
Chinese (Mandarin) http://www.rocketlanguages.com/chinese/
Arabic http://www.rocketlanguages.com/arabic/
4. Throwbacks to its workbook days!
This was an interesting observation. When Rocket Languages first started out 7 years ago the main way of delivering content on the internet was via audio files (MP3s) and PDFs. As technology and customer expectations have moved on the required quality of the delivery mechanism has increased with it. To that end we have spent a lot of time and effort increasing the interactivity between the user and the course, adding in things like Progress Tracking, Interactive Quizzes, Motivational Articles, My Vocab vocabulary builder, etc.
Unfortunately when we transferred our PDFs into the new content management system some references werent changed as they should have been and did come across as “workbook” like! Now we have reviewed our courses and enhanced the text so that it fits with the year 2011!
Got any comments on how you are finding and using the course? Leave a comment for me and I will respond asap!
All the best with your language learning
Jason Oxenham
CEO
Rocket Languages Ltd
Libros Media Ltd
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