We haven’t had any ELT Entrepreneurs on the blog for a while, but people setting up on their own from an ELT background is something we’re always interested in.
Over the summer, we spoke to Arthur Rubin, half of the husband and wife team behind AUTHORS & EDITORS, about their socially conscious publishing company.
ELT Entrepreneur Mark Holmwood of Holmwood Online got in touch with us to tell us about his transition from the classroom to the cutting room, making videos for his online publishing site which produces courses for schools and individuals in English and Chinese.
John Pettigrew has gone from working for publishers to bring his expertise to his own company, Futureproofs, a web-based platform that helps teams of authors, editors and designers to make sure that the books they work on are correct before they’re published.
Founded by Karen Spiller, Karen White and best-selling ELT author Sue Kay (Inside Out, Reward Resource Packs, Focus) to help connect writers with publishers. It also publishes training ebooks.
We’ve been featuring ELT Entrepreneurs and EdTech start-ups for a few months now and we have tended to focus on those who are quite far down the line in terms of their business and product. But what do they look like at the beginning of the journey? Last May, ELTjam co-organised an EdTech Start Up Weekend with the Judge Business School. At the time we commented on how few educators there were in the room and it was no surprise that it took educational insight more than tech to come up with the idea that won: Bright Stream.
Next in our series on people who’ve made the break into ELT Entrepreneurship is the three man team behind StudyBundles, an English language teaching and learning digital product provider specialising in preparatory pre-arrival courses for learners who want to study in English medium Higher Education.
The latest in our series looking at ELT-ers who’ve ventured out into business alone looks at the recent winners of the David Riley Award, Simple English Videos run by husband and wife team Vicki Hollett and Jay Silber. And, in keeping with their business, they offered to do their interview in video format.
In the latest in our series spotlighting entrepreneurs from within the ELT community, we talk to Robert Hanley about English Bubble and his journey from teacher to businessman.
For the second post in our ELT Entrepreneurs series we take a look at Paul Emmerson’s recently launched site BehereBethere. It’s a free and fun eLearning website for Business English where students can watch videos and learn about business from business professionals while improving their English. The site caters to three different levels and works on vocabulary and pronunciation.
We’ve been watching Marcos Benevides and his team at Atama-ii Books for over a year as their series of Choose Your Own Adventure Graded Readers went from an idea to a crowdfunding success to an actual out-now-and-buyable books. This is the first in what we hope to be a series of posts looking at what happens behind the scenes to ELT Entrepreneurs during their journey.
CASE STUDIES British Council Updating an existing training course for digital freelancers by researching and adapting it for a new market The British Council has been working in Iraq since 1940 and every year they connect with thousands of Iraqi students, teachers, artists, entrepreneurs, academics, and policymakers. The focus of their work is on providing … Read more
EtonX Developing an online entrepreneurship syllabus for young adults
In the inaugural episode of our new podcast series Adventures in Learning Design, Tim and Laurie explore what we actually mean by that term.
Being a distributed team here at LearnJam, we’re used to collaborating together and running remote workshops fully online. So, over the last month, we’ve loved seeing online communities grow and have been showing our virtual faces at as many online learning events as possible. Here are some of the Zooms and Hangouts we’ve been in … Read more
Berlin is perhaps best known for its blend of creativity, culture and art. It’s this innovative outlook that’s made it one of Europe’s most dynamic business scenes. In fact, a new startup is founded every 20 minutes, according to the German Times. And if you work in education, you’ll soon find yourself amongst a growing … Read more
We’ve always believed that a digital product is never finished – it should always be evolving and improving in response to user needs and changing technology. But a project we’re currently working on in Brazil has challenged that assumption, and taught us valuable lessons about how working within strict limitations can improve everything you do.
For the past three years or so, ELTjam has been working with CollegePre, a Beijing-based EdTech company whose digital content delivery platform is the muscle behind Cambridge ClassServer – a classroom technology solution developed with Cambridge English Language Assessment and Cambridge University Press. We managed to get some time with founder and CEO, Walter Wang, to get his unique perspective on EdTech in China.
In her previous post, Jenny Dance told us how she came up with the idea for a pronunciation app and got it published by OUP. Now, she tells us about the main challenges in bringing the app to market, how she overcame them and what she learned as a result. Inspiring reading for anyone thinking of taking the plunge and developing their own ELT product.
How many of your customers would be very disappointed if one of your products ceased to exist tomorrow? How many would register it only momentarily before replacing it with something that, as far as they’re concerned, is more or less interchangeable? My guess would be that (in the majority of cases) they would be only marginally inconvenienced, and this is something of an inconvenient truth in ELT publishing. Right now, we’re witnessing Product/Market Fill, when what we should be aiming for is Product/Market Fit. What does that mean, and what can publishers do about it?
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