The highlight of week 3 has been starting to create my own course in Instreamia. Obsessed with doing things the hard way, I am not only creating a course to teach English to my Chinese students, I am also creating a course to teach Chinese to myself and my peers.

I must admit, there have been a lot of teething problems with the platform, but the Rapp brothers have been working hard to make fixes to the system. And so far, I have:

– created a basic module (CH>EN and EN>CH)

– created an audio file self-introduction, with translation in English and Chinese and added it to the module as a listening exercise

– imported a music video from YouTube, added translations in English and Chinese, and added it to the module as a reading exercise

– added another video from the Instreamia library to the module

An issue that I have come across is that the platform can only handle YouTube videos, and YouTube is not available in mainland China. This does not cause an issue for me creating the course. However, it means that my Chinese students will not be able to watch the YouTube videos, and thus they will not be able to do the course! Despite this obvious setback, I will continue to build my course, and continue to scratch my head in hopes of a solution.