busuu.com is inconceivably big. It is in fact the largest social network for language learning in the world with over 30,000,000 users from 200 countries. That’s more than the population of Uzbekistan. It’s more than the populations of the Czech Republic, Sweden and Austria combined. It’s more than 800 times the size of Liechtenstein, the homeland … Read more
The folks over at Polish startup LangApp have come up with something rather special; a heady mix of vocabulary tutor, social network and shareable media library. It’s a potent brew. Vocabla is a powerful demonstration of how addictive language learning can be whilst also being both effective and entirely free. Its premise is a simple … Read more
More interesting news from adaptive learning technology provider Knewton today, as they announced their latest publisher partnership, this time with Cambridge University Press, and the opening of a new office in London. The partnership will see the Knewton API integrated with the Cambridge LMS platform, which currently serves over 250,000 students and teachers globally. The move … Read more
Back in June, Laurie wrote a piece on crowdfunding in ELT, which lamented the fact that nothing much ELT-related was happening on crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter. Well, there’s one recently launched project that’s definitely worth a look. Atama-ii Books is the brainchild of, amongst others, Marcos Benevides, a Japan-based teacher, publisher and author. Marcos is well … Read more
I don’t know what it is but we at eltjam are feeling a little nostalgic. It might be that we’ve met our 500th follower on twitter this week. It might be the spate of glorious weather that the UK is revelling in. Who knows? Either way, it’s at times like this that it makes sense … Read more
‘Brain storming’ solutions in a caffeine-fuelled idea-binge will help the company to realise it has potential, whereas opening your doors to the latest and brightest risk-takers on the scene will help your business to actually realise it’s potential.
Our idea was simple: the goal of almost any adult student over the age of 25 was to be able to speak English effectively. We decided to build a product to address that need and that need alone.
Is the linear ELT course on the way out? There’s a growing trend towards the provision of modular mix and match content, or even completely ‘atomised’ content. There are four key things driving this trend: The need to make content development faster and more efficient The potential for huge improvements in production efficiency The rise … Read more
The way learning activity is recorded by LMSs is about to undergo a long over-due shake up. If you use an LMS as either a student, a teacher, an administrator, or even as an LMS provider, you no doubt already have some misgivings about the way in which learning activity is tracked by the system: your LMS is probably too rigid to track all the results at the level of granularity you want; it is likely to be a painful process to conform your learning content to work with the way outcomes are tracked; and almost definitely your LMS is unable to track informal or non-curricular learning activity at all. You are not alone in your dissatisfaction. Fortunately, inroads are being made into redefining the way in learning experiences can be tracked and recorded.
A recent scary-sounding post on FutureBook (Will you be in the nine percent of publishers that survive?) about recent research into disruptive innovation got me thinking about what it might mean for ELT publishing. A few weeks ago I posted a primer on disruptive innovation in which I made the case for EdTech as a disruptive force in ELT. I thought it might be interesting now to delve into this a bit more and explore what it is that a disruptive ELT publisher might do, and how to avoid being among the ranks of the disrupted.
The typical creation, development, production and publication of an ELT title is an often gruelling process. The sheer amount of meetings, emails, phone calls, emails, meetings and Word docs is overwhelming to the point of maddening. But … that’s the way books are born, right? The key project team (publishers, editorial, production) correspond with each … Read more
Learning management systems were supposed to have died out by now, weren’t they? Swept away by a wave of 21st century platforms, mobile apps and MOOCs. In fact, in ELT, it feels like they’re only just getting going. Let’s have a look at the LMS market in general and see what the main ELT publishers … Read more
Shouldn’t we be prepared to dispense with the deep-rooted analog dependancies and create tech that reflects where we are now and what we want now?
Hear that distant rumbling sound? That’s the sound of every ELT publisher rushing to create ebook versions of their coursebooks because we’re moving into the age of the paperless classroom. As one of my American colleagues so wonderfully puts it, “The toothpaste is out of the tube” – there’s no going back now. But most e-textbooks are too print-faithful to be really useful. We need to take things further, and this post ends with some of the key questions that we need to look at if we’re going to use the paperless classroom as an opportunity to improve what a coursebook is, rather than just re-create what we’ve already had for 30 years.
It’s definitely a term that is being bandied around the ELT-osphere like a banned elastic band at a Band Aid concert. The Impatient Optimists site (of the Gates Foundation) declared that: “If 2012 was the MOOCs’ year for capturing venture capital and unrelenting media coverage, 2013 looks to be a big year for the adaptive learning … Read more
Re-run of a post from a few weeks ago, worth a read now that iOS7 is out in the wild. In a recent post, I predicted that tablets are inexorably going to take over our classrooms, at the expense of printed books (despite what Nick says!). However, there’s a big problem – implementing a one … Read more
SimCityEDU is the Great Gatsby of the video gaming world. That’s right. I want that to be my opening line. In the same way that Gatsby is a self-made man pursuing an idealised (albeit fundamentally flawed) dream that draws into it the rich variety of the city and its inhabitants, so too is SimCityEDU an … Read more
Now that web 2.0 is passé, and we’ve all got used to the concept of crowd-sourcing and the ‘wisdom of the crowd’, one of the hot crowd-related trends of the last couple of years has been crowdfunding. You may have heard tales of people raising huge sums of money in weeks on sites like Kickstarter. So, could crowdfunding have an impact on ELT? Well, why not.
The closer we get to the year 2015, the less certain I am that I’ll actually be able to purchase a hoverboard with which to zoom around town. Although the tech-laden utopia of Back To The Future Part 2 has been celebrated for its prescient creativity, I’ve come to realise that there comes a time when I have to manage my own sci-fi-fuelled expectations.
What will it mean when every English learner has a touchscreen internet-connected computer with them at all times? Previously, we looked at online learning and alternative credentialing platforms – now let’s look at what a mobile world and the paperless classroom might mean for ELT.
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