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Creating a Course

Introduction

In this page, I'll explain course creation in JTLanguage by means of walking through creating a simple course for studying some vocabulary, and filling in the content of one of the lessons, as an example. Other help pages will go into more detail of more specific possibliities of lesson content creation. First let's do a quick review of JTLanguage's organizational units and terminology in terms of courses.

Review of Organizational Units and Terminology

A "Course" in JTLanguage is what I call the top-level organizational unit for language lesson material. A Course can also be further organized into individual "Lesson" components, or lesson "Group" components that collect related lessons. Individual lessons contain audio/visual or textual "Content" components that contain the actual study material.

"Media Item" content components contain audio/visual media in the form of audio ".mp3" or video ".mp4" files, or preformatted textual material such as ".pdf" or raw ".txt" files. Different language versions of the files can be referenced by a single media content item. Media content items might also be references to embedded content by means of an HTML "object" element yo specify. They might also be static or interactive automated content driven by JTLanguage's markup template scripting mechanism.

"Content Type" and "Content Subtype" labels help categorize the media content items. For example, a content type of "Audio" refers to an audio file on the JTLanguage server or in the cloud. A content type of "Video" refers to a video file on the JTLanguage server, in the cloud, or on YouTube. Content subtypes indicate something symantical about the content. Examples include "Lesson", "Vocabulary", "Review", and so forth. Media content items also have options for "Player Source" ("File", "Cloud", or "YouTube") and "Player Type" ("Full", "Small", "Tiny", "None").

Textual or "Study List" content components contain textual material in the form of a list of individual "Study Item" components representing a paragraph, sentence, word, or character in one or more languages. These can include playable audio references to individual audio files, or references to audio in media items contained in the lesson. They can also be annotated. Study lists might also contain or reference formatted free-form content in the form of a markup template, which extends HTML with substitution, conditional, and looping components, and which can reference groups of or individual study items within the study list content component, or in other content components in the lesson

"Content Type" and "Content Subtype" labels help categorize the textual content items. The study tools in JTLanguage, such as the Flash Tool, get the sentence, word, or character study items from the study list components marked with content types of "Sentences", "Words", "Characters", "Expansion", or "Exercises". Other content type labels such as "Text", "Transcript", or "Notes" identify other types of static text (study items or formatted). A special content type label of "Comments" identify a comment content component for dialog between users including teachers and students.

"Document Item" components just contain or reference a markup template for free-form documents that can reference other content items.

Course Design

How extensive a course is, or in other words, how many lessons or groups of lessons are in the course, and what types of content components lessons contain, is left up to the course creator.

On one end of the spectrum it could be a small course with just a few lessons in a flat hierarchy, each containing word and sentence study lists, with no need for any lesson groups.

On the other end of the spectrum, it could be a huge course, with groups and subgroups of lessons arranged in a hierarchy, with lessons containing multiple audio or video media content items such as a lesson podcast or videos, an audio target dialog, and audio vocabulary review; associated textual content items such as a lesson transcript, dialog text, sentences, words, characters, expansion vocabulary, grammar notes, cultural notes, and comments; and a lesson summary document component.

You don't necessarily know in advance everything in a course, and lessons don't all have to have the same format, but it's probably good to decide beforehand how extensive a course is, and to come up with some standard lesson layouts.

Lesson Masters and Markup Templates

Both as a convenience and an organizational tool, you can create a "Lesson Master" that describes the layout of lessons and the content items they contain. These are managed under the Teacher->Masters page in JTLanguage.

When adding lessons to a course, if you specify a lesson master in the lesson profile page, JTLanguage will create the lesson with all the content components created also, but devoid of the actual content itself. You can then go in and add the specific content text or media yourself.

Lesson masters can also be used for the courses and groups, allowing you to specify content items that collect study items or media from all the child lessons in the course or group. Note that internally, these content items won't actually store the child study items, but just serve as placeholders.

You can look at the lesson master examples provided in JTLanguage, and there is also a mechanism that let's you copy from existing masters, including those of other teachers. Copying lesson masters from other should be okay, as long as you don't copy actual content or markup that could be considered intellectual property.

You can create lesson content components manually without a lesson master, but I think you'll find it a lot easier to let the lesson master do it. Find a help page about creating lesson masters here: Creating a Lesson Master

We also mentioned previously the markup templates, which can be used to layout individual course, group, lesson, or content pages and also script audio and interactive content. We'll cover markup templates in other help pages such as the following:

Creating a Markup Template
Markup Reference
Generate/Automated Markup Reference

Prerequisites

Before creating a course in JTLanguage, you first need to be logged into your JTLanguage account. If the course is to be public, as least at some point, you need to be registered as a teacher in your account settings. If registered as a student, you can still create courses for your own studies, but they will only be visible to you.

Your current account profile should have your target, host, and UI languages set up. To set these, go to the Home->Languages page, or go to the Home->Profile page and add a new profile with the desired languages.

The target language is the language the course will be teaching. The host language is the language to be used in the lesson explanations. The UI language is the language used by JTLanguage for the menus and UI elements. You can have multiple Target and Host languages. If a language has multiple transliterations, such as a romanization, you might want to include those in your target languages.

You probably want to create any master templates for the course and its groups and lessons before creating the actual course. Likewise your probably want to create any markup templates that are to be referenced. These all can be added or changed later by editing the associated profile page.

In the following sections, I'll walk you through creating a simple course with a couple of vocabulary lessons. The lesson master used for these lessons will create two audio media items for the vocabulary words and example sentences, and three study lists for the vocabulary words, example sentences, and vocabulary expansion. The master for the course will only contain study lists for the words and sentences. See the Creating a Lesson Master page for a walk-through of creating the master for the lessons.

The Courses Page

The place to start in creating a new course is to go to the Courses page via the Lessons->Courses menu item. By default it will list the courses for the languages set up in your profile. You can override this via the "Languages" drop-down menu. However, typically it's best to keep this set to the default of "Target Languages", as otherwise you might confuse JTLanguage when creating your course.

If there are a lot of courses from other teachers, you can filter them via the "Teacher" drop-down menu to a specific teacher, such as yourself, or if this field is set to "My Teachers", to a list of one or more teachers you specify in the Home->Teachers page. If set to "Any Teacher", the courses page will show the courses for all teachers of the specified languages.

To the right of each course listed you have some controls for operating on the course. What is shown depends on whether you are a teacher and the owner of the course. For example, the delete button only appears if you own the course or if you are an administrator.

At the bottom of the Courses page is a list of button links for operations related to courses, including buttons for adding a course manually or importing a course from an external file. These are the two main ways of inputting courses. In this document we are only covering adding a course manually.

Add a Course Profile

To create a course, start by adding a course object by clicking the "Add Course" button link at the bottom of the Courses page. This takes you to a page for editing the course profile, which represents information about the course itself as an organizational unit.

In the above screen shot, I've filled in the field for "Title", "Description", and selected a lesson master in "Master Template". The lesson master I chose defines just word vocabulary and sentence example study lists which will server as place-holders for collecting the vocabulary words and sentences from child lessons. I left the "Public" checkbox unchecked, so I can work on the lesson creation before making the course visible to other users. Note how the languages fields were already set to those of the current profile.

Once you are finished filling in the course profile, clicking the "Save" button will create a new course with the profile information, creating empty content items according to the lesson master, and then will take you to the course's main page.

Note how the main pane shows information about the course, including a "Course Information" pane showing some of the course profile information, a "Lessons and Groups" pane where child group or lesson nodes will be listed, and a "Content" pane showing the content items created in the course. At the bottom of the main pain are additional button links for navigation or operating on the course.

Note how the tree control on the right shows an expandable hierarcy for the course, which can be used for navigating in the course. At present it just shows the course words and sentence study list placeholders.

Add the Lessons

To start adding lessons to the course, we first go to the "Edit course children" page by clicking that button link in the "Lessons and Groups" pane.

The "Edit Children" page indicates that no course children are defined yet. The "Children edit" field set on the page contains buttons for editing the course children. The first two buttons are for adding individual groups and lessons. The third button is for convenience in adding multiple lessons at once, using a pattern for a title with an incrementing lesson number. Of course you can always go back and change the title to something more meaningful.

In our simple example, we'll add two lessons at once, using the "Add multiple lessons" button. Clicking it will bring up a page for setting up the profile for the lessons.

Note how I used the '#' character in the title and description to mark where an incrementing number is substituted. Note again how the languages are already specified. For the lesson master, I chose a different lesson master I had created previously that defines two audio media items, and three study lists. Again I leave the "Public" checkbox unchecked, though it doesn't matter, since the course is still private. In the "Node count" field I put "2", to create two lessons.

The only difference between the add multiple lessons page and the add individual lesson pages is an additional field labeled "Node count" for specifying how many lessons to create, and that in the title you can use a '#' character as a place-holder for a number. Otherwise an incrementing number will be appended. Note also that if you are adding groups, the profile page is pretty much the same as well. Internally, lesson group nodes are the same as lesson nodes, except group nodes can have child nodes such as subgroups or lessons.

Pressing the "Save" button will add the two lessons using the provided profile information, and will populate the lessons with the empty content items defined by the lesson master. You will then be taken back to the "Edit Children" page for the course, and it will show the two lessons.

Note also have after adding the lessons, the tree control also shows the two new lessons, and having clicked on the "+" by the first lesson, it opened it up to show the created content items.

If you click on one of the lessons in the main pane or in the tree, it will take you to a main page for the lesson.

Note the "Content" fieldset that lists the content items for the lists. Clicking on a content item will take you to that item. To the right of the title and description for the content items are some buttons for various things you can do with the content items. Alternatively, you can anvigate to content items by clicking on their titles in the tree control.

Notes on Filling in Content Items

At this point, our course and lesson hierarchy is in place, although with nothing in the content items. The next steps are to go fill in the content items with the lesson material.

You can fill in the content items in any order, but if there are dependencies between content items, it might be more efficient to fill them in in an order that accounts for those dependencies.

In our lesson example, we are going to have audio files containing our spoken vocabulary words and example sentences in groups in two files. We will also have words and sentences study lists that contain text for these items and have them refer to the audio files for the target language audio. Because of this, it makes more sense to fill in the study lists, record the audio files, and then map the audio to the text. Doing it in this order also gives us the advantage of being able to read the text while recording using the Map Media page.

Note that this is only one of a few different ways of associating audio with the study items.

For the Words and Sentences study list content items in our example, we'll be using the reference scheme we just described that associates study items with pointers to segments in the audio media item content file.

Anther way we could do it is to record individual audio files for the words and sentences study lists separately. This could be done either using the built-in recording tool, or recording items outside of JTLanguage with your favorite audio tools and then uploading the files. However this all takes more time and effort.

Alternatively, we could leave out the media content items entirely, and just use the built-in voice synthesis to generate individual audio files for the study list items. This is the easiest and quickest approach, but has the disadvantage of the limitations of the voice synthesis technology (although actually it's quite good for many languages). If you don't have a native speaker to record the audio, this might even be a preferred approach, or just a temporary step until you find a native speaker to re-record the audio. I'll demonstrate this later when filling in the expansion vocabulary study list.

Yet another option is to start out with the scheme referencing media items, but then use the "Extract language media from references" button on the study list edit page to pull out individual media files from the bigger media item's source file. This also moves the text mapping info into the media item, thus removing the dependency between the media and study list items.

Navigating to Edit Pages

All the content items in a lesson have one or more kinds of edit pages you can use for adding and editing content. There are two main ways to access the edit pages.

One way is to click on a content item, which takes you to the main page for displaying the content. At the bottom of the main pane there will be some button links for navigating and some operations on the content, including different kinds of editing operations. For example, study lists will have an "Edit" button link.

The other way is to go to the lesson's main page and click on the "Edit lesson content" link at the bottom of the "Content" pane. You will be taken to a page listing the content items, with buttons for various kinds of editing and other operations on the content items.

Fill in the Words Study List - Using the Edit Mechanism

To fill in the Words study list, I'll demonstrate the way to do it manually using the editing mechanisms in JTLanguage. To keep it short, we'll just add numbers "one" through "five" and their German translations as our study items.

Using one of the two ways we explained to get to the "Edit" page for the "Words" study list, we do so, and make sure the "Select Display" drop-down menu field is set to "Edit Text". (Other selections include "Edit Document" for editing an associated markup template, "Edit Speaker Names" for editing speaker name labels for text and transcripts, "Edit Profile" for editing the content item profile, and "Content Options" for editing various options related to the content.)

To add a study item to the study list, in the "Edit Items" fieldset, click the "Append" link, making sure the edit box next to it contains "1". Since we have a single target and host language set up, edit boxes for both languages appear. We fill in our first study item, and then click "Save", which redisplays the pane with our new study item.

If we know how many study items we will have, we can set the edit box next to the "Append" button link to that number, and then that many study item edit boxes will appear. Furthermore, if we want to save a little time, we can just enter the study items in the host or target language, and then click "Translate". This will fill in the empty edit boxes by using the Google Translate API to translate the non-empty items we did enter. Afterwards, it leaves the edit boxes displayed so that we can fix any incorrect translations. When correct, we click "Save" to save our changes. If there were no changes need, we could also just click "Cancel", as the translation process saves the intial items.

I'll do this, setting the "Append" box to 4, and enter numbers "two" through "five". Then I'll click "Translate". There were no mistakes, so I'll just click "Save" anyway. I'm done with entering study items for now, so I'll click the "Done" button to return to the previous page. I got there from the "Words Vocabulary" page, so that page is displayed for me.

Note that we have no audio media associated with our study items yet. We'll do this later when we set up the audio media items and then map the text to the audio.

Fill in the Sentences Study List - Using the Import Mechanism

To fill in the Words study list, I'll demonstrate a way to do it using the study list import mechanism. To keep it short, again we'll just add 5 sentences using the numbers "one" through "five" and their German translations as our study items.

First we navigate to the empty "Sentences Vocabulary" study list page.

Then we click the "Import" button link at the bottom. This brings up the Import page.

There are a variety of import format options you can select via the "Select Format" drop-down menu field. Only a couple of them are suitable for human-created text. We'll select the "Patterned Line" option, which let's us input study items as individual lines of text, either directly on the screen, or from a text file we wrote externally or exported from some other tool or database.

How the lines are formatted can be very flexible. The "Pattern" field lets us specify a pattern for our lines in which special tokens will be used as substitution markers. This is where a bit of programming technology creeps in. The default pattern is "%{t}\t%{h}". The "%{t}" and "%{h}" tokens represent the target and host language items in the line. They are separated by a "\t" which represents a TAB character. However, I prefer a more visible separator, so I generally change it to a "|" character like this: "%{t}|%{h}"

Therefore, when I input the study item lines, they should be of the form:

Deutscher Satz.|English sentence.

See the actual text in the screenshot above.

Note that if you have alternate transliterations, such as a Romanization, or otherwise multiple languages, you can specify these fields using something like "%{t1}" or "%{t2}" and so forth, incrementing the number, which represents the zero-based index of the target language in the current language settings.

To see more information about the pattern substitution tokens available, you can click the "Show field help" link in the help panel to the lower right.

Note that you can have the pattern do things like extract alternate language items such as a Romanized version of the item, or skip numbers or other unneeded fields, such as might be the case if the study items come from data exported from some other tool or database.

In the patterned line import format, you have the option of entering the text from a file you created separately, or directly from an edit box via the "Import Type" field setting. I choose "Text" above, so that I could enter the sentences directly on the page, and then I typed in my sentences. Clicking "Import" will create study items from the text, using the substitution pattern, and then take you back to the Sentences Vocabulary page.

If you have text that is in blocks of separate languages, you could have used the "Patterned Block" import format instead, which has a similar settings page. However the pattern will necessarily be a bit more complicated. The default block pattern is: "%p{%{t}}\n%p{%{h}}" In this pattern, the "%p{...}" token represents a block of lines described by the pattern inside the braces. So in this case we have our blocks of target and host lines divided by a newline character represented by "\n". Thus our input text would instead be:

Ich habe eine Chance.
Zweimal falsch ergibt nicht einmal richtig.
Drei ist eine Menschenmenge.
Ich habe nur vier.
Die fünf Hunde spielen.

I have one chance.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Three is a crowd.
I only have four.
The five dogs are playing.
    

One of the reasons I put these import mechanisms in JTLanguage is that there may be other language study tools or resources that can export or otherwise provide study material in raw text form. If this material is formatted in a regular manner, hopefully the pattern parsing mechanism these two format mechanisms provide will be flexible enough to let you import it with minimal prior editing by hand.

Note that in addition to supporting importing, these format mechanisms also support exporting in the same manner, in case you want to export to and study the material using other tools. Few things frustrate me more in using other people's tools, than when they are so protective of their content that they don't let you export it for use in your own favorite tools.

Next, we'll turn our attention to creating the audio files for the two audio media content items.

Creating the Words Vocabulary Audio File Using the Map Media Page with Recording

We'll record and edit the words vocabulary audio file directly in JTLanguage. Note that alternatively, you can record files outside of JTLanguage using your favorite tools and then upload the file instead. We'll demonstrate that for the other audio media item in our lesson for example sentences.

Note also that you can upload video files or reference them in your own cloud storage. Unfortunately, you'll need to record and edit video files using external tools and then upload them, as current browser technology doesn't readily support recording and editing videos. However, you can still map text to the video in the same way as for the audio, to support subtitles and referencing the audio in study lists. JTLanguage does this by extracting the audio track automatically, though you can also upload it yourself.

Note that you can also support referencing YouTube videos. The JTLanguage media player and mapping tools support this in that same way as raw video files. For information on this, please see the help page I wrote for doing this: Creating a Lesson from a YouTube Video

Note that although JTLanguage does support storing and streaming video files, because JTLanguage is currently hosted on a computer in my home using a normal home internet service, for other than very short videos, please use YouTube videos or reference them in your own cloud storage. Later on, I'll probably change JTLanguage to transparently use some form of faster external cloud storage for the media. But as this costs extra money, for now I'll continue using local storage.

To begin, we'll navigate to the Map Media page. One way to do this is to click on the "Audio Vocabulary" link in the tree control, which brings up the media player, and then click on the "Map media to text" link at the bottom of the media player page.

Another way to get there is to go to the lesson's main page and click on the "Edit lesson content" link at the bottom of the "Content" pane. You will be taken to the lesson's "Edit Content" page, show below with the "Map to media" button highlighted.

Clicking the "Map to media" button takes you to the "Map Media" page.

Actually, "Map Media" is a bit of a misnomer. In addition to mapping the audio to the study items, you can also record and edit the audio files. You can even edit the study item text itself, such that filling in the study lists could be done here, to some extent, perhaps as a transcription operation.

Note that because of the audio editing mechanism, some browsers will prompt you for permission to use the microphone when you first display the page. It won't actually record anything until you click the record button.

The "Map Media" page is a pretty big page. You can click the "Show field help" link in the help panel to the lower right to see explanations of the different fields, but I'll point out the main areas.

Below the title stuff in the main content pane are some controls for selecting a different media item or language item, subtitle controls, and a playback speed control.

The next few rows of controls are the media player and editing controls. The empty box will show a visualization of the audio once we've recorded something. If the media were for video, the video would be displayed here also.

The "Text" fieldset shows a list box with the associated study list text, just like in the normal media player. This can also be used to select the current study item to be mapped or edited. It also might be useful to read the text while recording. Note that you can reference muliple study lists. In this case, a title heading will show which study list the text items are from.

The box below the "Text" fieldset contains controls for editing the current text item. It shows buttons for adding, inserting, updating, and deleting study items. It shows the associated time range for the study item such than you could fine tune the times numerically. You can use these controls to fix problems in the study list you might notice, or you might even use it to help transcribe an audio file you recorded previously.

Recording the Audio

Let's get down to the business of recording the audio file. To do so, I'll click the (Record) button, wait for the "(recording...)" status message, read the text with a short pause between each word, then click the (Stop) button, to finish the recording. This sends the audio data to the server, and then also requests the audio visualization data.

Note, however, that the recording is in a temporary editing state. To save the recording, you need to click the "Save" button either now or at some later point after editing, as indicated by the save button being activated. If you want to re-record, you can click the "Cancel" button and start the process over.

You might want to do some editing, such as croping the audio to remove too much silence or sounds at the start and end of the recording. To do this, select the part you want by clicking in the visualization at the start you want, dragging the mouse to the end you want, and then releasing the mouse. The selected section is highlighted in yellow. Then just click the (Crop) button. Click "Save" to save your changes.

Note that there are (Undo) and (Redo) buttons that can undo and redo multiple changes, and (Copy), (Cut), and (Paste) buttons that can cut, copy, and paste selected audio clips. The (Clear) button silences the selected clip, which is useful for clearing pops. The (Delete) button will delect the selected clip. The (Deselect) button deselects any clip. Again, once you are done with any editing, be sure to click Save. If you try to leave the page with unsaved changes, a message box will warn you of this.

Mapping the Text to the Audio

Mapping the text to the audio is the process of adding audio clip references to study list text items, so that clicking a (Play) button next to a study item on a text page will play the audio clip.

There are multiple ways to map the text to the audio in the Map Media page. One basic processis to click on a text item in the "Text" pane to select it, select an audio clip in the visualization, and then click the "Map Text" button. The audio clip selection is then highlighted in orange color, and the text selection advances to the next item.

Alternatively, click on the start of an audio item, click the "Map Text Start" button, click on the end of the audio item, and then click the "Map Text Stop" button. Note how the text of the "Map" button changes depending on the state.

You can also do the mapping while the audio is playing. First, click on a text item in the "Text" pane to select it, click the (Play) button, and then with a combination of listening to the audio and watching the visualization, you can click on the "Map Text Start/Map Text Stop" button at the start and ending of the audio items. The audio clip selection is then highlighted in orange color, and the text selection advances to the next item.

If the recording is like ours, where we read a list of items with a nice pause between them, we could alternatively use the "Auto Map" button. This mechanism tries to identify the audio clips corresponding to text by looking for pauses between the word or sentence items. If the audio recording has no preamble, you can just click the "Auto Map" button. The audio clip selections are highlighted in orange color.

However, it might be that mistakes were made, such as noise being mistaken for an audio item, or too long of a pause maps an audio item in multiple pieces. You can change the sensitivity by tweaking the "Width" and "Height" fields next to the mapping controls. The "Width" number is an indicator of how long a space to trigger an audio item break. The "Height" number is an indicator of the amplitude threshold that indicates a break between words. The units are kind of arbitrary. You can click the "Clear Map" but to clear the prior mappings, tweak the width and height, and then try "Auto Map" again. To auto-map only a specific section, select the range of audio you want to auto-map and the text item to start with, and then click "Auto Map". To clear the mappings for a selected range, select the range of audio you want to clear mappings, and then click the "Clear Map" button.

When finished, all our study items are shown as mapped.

Note that you don't need to click the "Save" button for mapping. The mapping process implicitly saves each mapping change.

Testing our Mapping

To test our mapping, we can put the Map Media page into a "Play" mode by changing the "Mode" drop-down menu field to "Play". In the "Play" mode, if you play the audio file, the subtitles and Text pane selection will track the audio. In "Map" mode, they will not, allowing you to do the mapping.

A more precise way of checking the mapping is to go to the associated study list text page. The mapped items should now display (Play) buttons. Click each button to make sure the audio is right.

If any item is not right, you can go back to the Map Media page to fix it, or you can do it for individual study items on the Edit Text page for the study list using the (Map media) button, which displays an inline Map Media page, or you can click the the (Edit media runs) button, and edit the raw time values.

Creating the Sentences Vocabulary Audio File Using Uploading

You might prefer recording an audio media item file with your favorite audio recording tool, or you might have a file recorded already. In this case, you can just upload the desired file, either directly from the map media page using the "Import" button, or you can click the "Upload Media" button link at the bottom of the media player or map media page, or you can click the (Upload Media) button in an "Edit Content" page for a media item. You'll then select the file you want to upload and click "Upload". The file will be uploaded and renamed to the name pattern set up in the profile page for the media item.

After uploading the media file, you can do the text mapping in the same way we did it for the Words Vocabulary study list using the Map Media page.

Filling in the Expansion Vocabulary

For the expansion vocabulary, I'm going to just use the voice synthesis feature to associate audio with the study items. I'll first fill in just the English text by navigating to the import page for the study list, selecting the Patterned Line format, changing the pattern, and then entering my English text, which is just the numbers from eleven to fifteen:

We'll click the "Import" button, and then navigate to the Edit page for the expansion vocabulary.

Now we want to add our German transations. Find the (Add translations) button in the "Edit Language" field set. Making sure the languages drop-down menu is set to "My Languages", click the (Add translations) button.

The page will then show edit boxes filled with our text and the translation. This is a chance to fix any problems. There weren't any, so we just click "Save".

Now we want to add some synthesized audio. The controls for doing this are in the "Speech Synthesis" field set near the bottom. The "Language" drop-down menu probably defaults to "German". However, let's have it do English as well, so change the language to "My Languages". There is a drop-down menu for selecting a voice for specific languages, but most languages only have one voice anyway. Click the "Add synthesized Speech" button link. A pane opens up to display the status, and when finished, the study items now have (Play) buttons you can click on..

To change the language of the audio, you can click the "Show content options" link at the bottom of the pane. This opens up a "Content Options" pane under the title. Use the "Media Language" drop-down menu to select a different default language for the media playback. Click the "Hide content options" to hide it again, if desired.

You might want to add English audio to the other study lists too, as it might be useful in the study tools. Just use the same procedure, except first change the speech synthesis language to "English", as we already have referenced audio for German.

Make the Course Public

Once your are satisfied with your course, you can mark it as public, which in effect, publishes it on JTLanguage. To do this, navigate to the course's main page. In the "Course Information" fieldset you will find an "Edit course profile" link. Click on it to edit the course profile.

To make the course and all its lesson public, check the "Public" and "Propagate visibility" checkboxes, as shown above. Click "Save" to save the changes. The "Propagate visibility" checkbox being checked, the Public flag will be propated to the lessons in the course as well.

Conclusion

I've walked you through the creation of a simple course, and filled in one lesson for it. Of course there is much more you could do with these and other kinds of content items. I'll create other help pages for specific cases.

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