I think your course is well organised and is great for beginners as well as more advanced. I've only listened to about 30 lessons so far. I like that at any time I can review lessons. It's also great to be listening to native speakers. Unfortunately there is no short cut to learning a new language especially when it comes to tonal Asian languages. Conversation context is great.

Seeing the pinyin makes a big difference. I like to picture it in my head when composing sentences and having the tones works helps a lot. Your product is great! Especially now I can visualise the tones.

I think Chinese Learn Online is definitely one of the better programs out there. It is a gradual course which takes the learner from total beginner with no previous knowledge, and builds up from there. I used several of the podcasts for a Conversational Chinese course that I taught at our local junior college, and the response from the students was very positive. The methodology is very sound, and the real advantage is that students are not overwhelmed in the beginning, nor are they permanently stuck in a lower level.