The goal for ATG staff for the “China: Traditions and Transformations” iSite was to help students sort, classify, and visualize important events in Chinese history and learn some basic vocabulary pertaining to Chinese history.

ATG staff created an interactive syllabus and audio-rich pronunciation guide, and migrated a previous timeline of Chinese history to a timemap on the course iSite. The interactive timemap puts events discussed in the course in chronological and geographic perspective, enabling students to commit milestones to memory much more quickly. The pronunciation guide has filters for course week, tag, or alphabet, as well as the option to view all glossary entries at once by clicking on the Google Spreadsheet (GSS) in the footer.

The timemap and pronunciation guide were made possible with Google Maps, Nick Rabinowitz’ Timemap Library, and developer tools including GSS-API and jQuery.

Details are available on the course iSite.