Since 2013, ELTjam has evolved from a blog to a learning agency, but what got us fired up to start in the first place was our interest in tech, startup culture and new ways of working, and how these could be brought into ELT. One example is Agile – the standard way of running software projects and developing tech products – but in our experience still not used much in ELT materials development when done at a large scale. This post is about how we recently used Agile in a large ELT course development project.
Two years ago, ELTjam asked whether it was possible to produce an ELT course book using Agile workflows in the strictest definition of the term, creating lots of discussion. At emc design, we’re starting to see our clients use many different approaches to new courses, some using agile-inspired techniques. But can traditional ELT print publishers take ‘true’ Agile on board sustainably? Is it possible to approach a print product in exactly the same way as we approach digital products? Or are they just too different?
Enrique Bernal of Cuenta a2lenguas looks at the evolution — or not — of Graded Readers and asks what the next step might look like.
The final in our series: A Beginner’s Guide to Teaching Online. Jaime has been teaching private online lessons for TOEFL iBT since 2010. By 2012, she had left local schools and earned 100% of her income from teaching online lessons. In this series, she answers the question of which of the many platforms (like Skype or Wiz IQ) is best for teaching online. This post looks at sharing materials with students.
This post looks at the ideas and business models that are working within open education, and builds on discussions with the wider ELT community on ways to deal with access, copyright and materials writing/development.
Over the last couple of years, the blog has covered a lot of topics of interest to ELT authors so we thought it might be useful to look back at them and collect them all in one place.
Welcome to the second installment of The ELTjam Lexicon of ELT in the Digital Age. You can read more about the series here and see the full list of terms we plan to cover here. This week, we’re finishing off the ‘A’s.
Another post sparked by an Innovate ELT talk, this time given by Fiona Oates and Andrew Dodd, about their Mental Health Friendly initiative, the result of conversations between the two Barcelona-based English teachers. Fiona tell us how they got started and more about the project.
We invited speakers at the Innovate ELT conference to submit write-ups of their talks and this is the first. Here, materials writer Claire Hart reflects on an increasingly common role for writers: adapting print content for digital delivery.
Few words have been so prevalent in ELT as ‘EdTech’ and it has not been unusual to attend conferences where perhaps more than half of the talks on the schedule made at least some reference to the impending digital disruption sweeping into our sector and how best to prepare for it, avoid it or pretend it didn’t exist. Pearson’s Brian Engquist gives us his take on how to proceed.
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.
The acronym MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, seems to be popping up in conversations with ELT publishers all over the place right now; and that’s odd, because up until about 2013, I’d never heard a publisher mention it. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an MVP is a tactic used in product development to gauge customer interest in a new product or product feature. The idea is that you don’t build the whole thing; you just build enough to see whether people might be interested in what you’re proposing. What many people seem to actually be doing with their MVP is applying the Pareto Principle. Otherwise known as the 80–20 rule
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.
At its basic core, ELT materials writing for digital components (e.g. interactive CD-ROMs, LMS, Moodle) isn’t hugely difference from writing for any other form (e.g. paper-based course books); the principles of good materials writing remain the same. However, there are few points that are worth listing as ‘emerging’.
Sunday saw a first for MaWSIG (IATEFL’s materials writing special interest group) — an online festival that could be attended by anyone, anywhere. Via three streams, participants were able to interact with editors and experts from Edtech as well as ELT and mainstream publishing. Three webinars, a Twitter chat and a Facebook panel chat ran, one after the other, with breaks in between for “switching rooms”.
My friend’s dad gave her some advice once that I took to heart.
What your job is called matters more than what your job is.
I always agreed so what I’m about to say seems like a contradiction.
I don’t see the problem with being called, or hired as, a Content Creator if that’s what the job requires.
If you haven’t already read Nick Robinson’s excellent post on ELTjam about book piracy and the lively conversation it’s started, go check it out. To sum it up, just about every ELT textbook that’s ever been published (including mine) have been ripped off by pirates and put on innumerable free PDF download sites all over the Internet. The conversation has branched off in many directions: Is piracy really that bad? Is copyright law generally a moral thing? Are authors totally screwed? And so on. One thing I think hasn’t been addressed fully is what we can do to limit piracy or make it work for us. Expanding on suggestions I’ve made in comments on the original post, why can’t some of these things be done?
In all of the recent debate on this site about the future of ELT, the voice of the ELT publisher has often been noticeably absent . With this in mind, we thought it would be interesting to get the views of a board-level ELT publisher to get their reaction to the conversations taking place about and around them. In this first instalment John Tuttle, until recently the Deputy Managing Director of ELT at Cambridge University Press, tells us about the evolution of the ELT publishing industry and some of the common misconceptions surrounding its key players.
It was interesting to be at IATEFL this year, the annual land grab for attention larger than ever, and a conference dominated by discussions, presentations and a plenary about the future of ELT, which – it is suggested – will be completely mediated by technologies (more of this fallacy later). With Sugata Mitra selling his … Read more
Where are we going with Adaptive Learning and ELT? I’m a little worried we might be mapping our path before we’ve seen it. So here are 5 assumptions I’ve identified from our posts on the subject so far, and my thoughts on each.
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