Suggestions needed--text/audio

[Peter Bogdanoff]

Hi,

A professor I work with at UCLA has just returned from a lengthy trip China where he was a guest at several universities. During his visit, he was impressed with the need for better English tutoring for many of the graduate students he met with, many who want to study in the US or need better English skills to qualify for entrance to Chinese universities. He's now putting together an English phrase guide that he wants to add audio pronunciations. At this point, it's simple--the user reads text and clicks on the same text to hear it pronounced. This may develop into a larger project, but for now he needs something quick that he can make available to a group of people there now for their use.

I'm trying to figure out a good way to make this text document with audio and have it available over the Internet to users in China. The material would be updated and added to by the professor over the next 6 months or more, but the initial material needs to be available soon (next couple of weeks).

An iShell project would probably work with a downloadable player (requiring QT to be installed) accessing the text material and audio files over the Internet. That I can probably do.

Are there other methods? I saw a demo of HTML 5 and JQuery showing clickable text with audio:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/quick-tip-the-html-5-audio-element/

I don't know Javascript (I think that is what it is), but it's a totally online solution. I understand that TribalMedia was working on some Web method to do something like this, but of course, there isn't much info available.

I don't know Flash and don't want to learn it--that's why I used iShell.

Any suggestions?

Peter Bogdanoff

(310) 825-8494
UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture
240 Charles Young Drive N
Broad Art Center 2275
Los Angeles, CA 90095

[Lloyd Sharp]

Hi

Yes ishell would still probably be ok for this.

However due to the installation and support issues at the client end that you may need to deal with and the totally unknown range of operating systems and browsers in China - I would probably look at a simple browser only web delivery system that is flexible and easy to manage and quickly adjust.

And yes html 5 would be ok but you would be working with an end user scenario with really wide and varied capacities. ie. I would assume that the latest browsers that are html5 capable would not make up even a small percentage of the target market. [From my very basic research and knowledge of the region]

It seems you are looking at a fairly simple structure.

Personally i would look at either of these two simple to setup opensource CMS web based LAMP [linux,apache,mysql,php] style systems.

They are easy to setup, manage and also to transfer to other hosting setups or LAN servers at low cost.

And they would probably require lower levels of support to resolve enduser issues.

moodle

http://moodle.org/

wordpress

http://wordpress.org/

Both are fairly easy to setup, customise and maintain and move to other WAn or LAN servers if desired/required.

Lloyd

_________________

Lloyd Sharp - lsh...@bigpond.net.au

[Digital Art & Design] www.chickenfish.cc

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[Peter Bogdanoff]

Thanks, Lloyd, for the suggestions. I've worked with Moodle a little, it's used here at UCLA, but don't remember the details about handling media. I'll look into it further.

So, both Moodle and WordPress will allow clickable text that simply plays audio (without leaving the page or having to show a player)? I see many audio plugins for wordpress...

Peter

[Gil Anspacher, Tribalmedia Support]

Peter,

I have an iShell title running via the web in China. The clients are used to dealing with English programs in a Chinese environment. But these clients have the windows os in English with the ability to display programs in Chinese characters. Thus, our program is displayed in English.

The main issue we have found is the number of hops (intersections) on the web an end user must take to get the info. We are using a CDN (Limelight) and still we are seeing 15 hops and thus the load time can be slow if you have multiple bits on each page. Streaming QT video was unusable. Test, test,test here.

That said, iShell is probably the easiest tool to do what you want to do. Many others available if you have the skillset to use them or are willing to sub for that.

Best,
Gil

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From: Peter Bogdanoff <bogd...@ucla.edu>
Reply-To: "Triba...@googlegroups.com" <Triba...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 15:49:34 -0800
To: "Triba...@googlegroups.com" <Triba...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Suggestions needed--text/audio

[Peter Bogdanoff]

Gil,

Thanks, that's very helpful to know that iShell is a viable option.

Peter