The Base of Future Language-Learning Platforms: Free, Online, Dual-Language Situational Videos

My father, brother and I are learning French together. We all have different levels: my Dad has a high level of French, I'm in the middle, and my brother is just starting. Mainly we are just writing each other via e-mail in French, using any tool we have, mostly Google Translate.

One activity we do is everyday we will all watch a free video at french.about.com. They are very good for learners since they (1) contain real situations with full-speed French, (2) have the dual-language transcript below while the people are talking, and (3) at the end they read off vocabulary that came about in the video

The great thing about these videos is each of us can use them at our own level, and by talking about them, reusing the words, negotiating the meaning, we help each other learn.

I can watch these on my smart phone anywhere, anytime. My brother listens to them while commuting, and my Dad watches them on his computer or his smart phone while out for a walk. They are free, they are online, and they are everywhere.

Using these videos, our free online resources, and each other, we have created out own little "learning hive", and since we don't really have any loose cash to pay a French teacher at this time, this is all we need to improve our French, and by the end of the year our ability to communicate in French will have improved greatly.

But imagine a French teacher offered us a service in which he was also in the e-mail loop, took the texts we were writing to each other, corrected them, analyzed the errors we were making, assigned us online, interactive exercises where we received points for completing them, joined in the conversation. Now that would be useful and worth paying for.

Some teachers tell me that their customers often cancel classes because of time constraints, and ask how they should get payment because the customer cancelled. Instead of demanding that you get paid for not teaching, why not offer to teach in a way that makes sense to your customers' time constraints?

• create these kinds of videos as a base (this is easy and doable today with 80 Euro cameras and free YouTube, and YouTube can transcribe your videos for free now)
• teach your students how to use them on their own time, on their own devices
• build a software platform in which they can communicate on their own time (posting on a web site) where you can correct their communication to each other and join the conversation as well -- if you can't do this or can't pay someone to build it, then use e-mail, word documents, excel documents, etc. to build up some kind of workflow that makes sense
• offer (e.g. via Google calendar) a way for them to define and sign up for real-time coaching, e.g. if they want to practice a specific skill like presenting, telephoning, etc.

This is where language acquisition is moving. As language learners begin to experience how flexible, free, and useful this kind of instruction is, and as language teachers learn how to use these platforms and add value to them, it will be harder to try to continue to sell customers a traditional course at a specific time with a traditional paper workbook -- customers will have less and less time or money for that.

English Teachers Need to Become Creative Players in the Technology that is Changing their Profession

Professional English teachers are moving away from a world in which our students and customers had a lack of access to quality educational material and instruction. Look at Video2Brain where as of December 2011 you can get 24/7 access on your "PC, laptop, or tablet" to over 500+ hours of the newest technology taught by experts in their field, all for a $15-per-month flat rate. Fifteen dollars is less than the average English teacher here in Berlin charges for one hour of instruction. Even though the language instruction market is at the low-end for profit margins, eventually companies such as Video2Brain (charging dumping prices for their quality instruction) and organizations such as Khan Academy (giving away quality education for free) will be moving into the English teaching market and giving individual teachers and language schools competition on a scale that makes it impossible to make significant money in the same way English teachers did before.

As "professional English teachers" we need to realize we will soon be in a world where companies rarely hire external instructors or contract out to language schools since they have conveniently signed their whole company up to an online English learning service which continually improves the English of all employees at every level, proofreads and does translations of all outgoing English correspondence in real-time via a global network of translators, provides 24/7 video English conversation and instruction with teachers available in all time-zones via audio or video, and provides this for an affordable monthly flat-rate that companies gladly pay since it is simply a better service than what they had before, improves the English of more of their employees than before, and to which the service company continually adds new features.

Education in such a post-lack-of-access world will be very unfriendly to teachers and very generous to learners. And so today, people who consider English teaching their career need to be asking the right questions: (1) How can I continue to provide competitive, quality instruction in a market moving in this direction, and (2) How can I charge enough for my services in a market moving in this direction? The answer to both questions involves getting a technical grasp on the changes that are occurring and becoming a creative player in this space. The reason that someone today can educate herself as a computer programmer or graphic designer for only $15 a month is in large part because of changes in technology in the last five years. If you don't understand what these changes are, you don't understand something key about your profession, since the same kind of inexpensive, mass-scale offerings are going to start moving into our field of English teaching, which will change what jobs you get, how you teach, and how much you can earn. To remain a "professional English teacher" you need to become a creative player in the technology that is changing your profession.

When I got my M.Ed. in TESOL in 1993, the skills/experience that we accumulated were basically these:

• deep knowledge of English grammar
• good vocabulary and writing skills
• basic knowledge of sociolinguistic theory
• lesson planning
• curriculum design
• classroom management
• experience teaching adults
• experience teaching children

With these skills and experience, I was able to work in the 90s in the Berlin English teaching market as a "professional English teacher". But in order to compete with the coming competition where large corporations (perhaps Facebook or Google?), established educational companies (perhaps Video2Brain?), and altruistic organizations (perhaps Khan Academy?) will be offering high-quality, 24/7 English instruction/proofreading/translations for a low price, then in addition to the above skills, you will need the following skills as well:

• solid presentational and technical skills to create quality instructional videos and post them online
• good knowledge of gaming theory
• good knowledge of online community motivational psychology
• solid sales skills and practical experience in tapping into corporate budgets
• pedagogical and technical experience teaching with Skype and similar technologies
• experience developing creative pay models for remote and virtual instruction
• experience teaching adults via social media
• experience teaching children via online games
• a continual up-to-date knowledge of current learning tools and resources for learners of English
• skills for creating and marketing online instructional content, communities, and applications
• good SEO skills to market your online educational offerings
• good online social marketing and networking skills
• the ability to work with others who have skills you do not have in order to create learning communities in which you sell services
  
  

Personally I have programming skills with which I currently make a living, but if I still only had my M.Ed. in TESOL, and depended on English teaching to earn a living in 2012 and beyond, I would be scrambling to update my "professional English teacher" profile to meet the demands of the competition in this coming decade, so I wouldn't have to depend on the odd family tutoring job or the one-on-one teaching jobs, or the 2-month-long-3-times-a-week classes which seem to have become the standard offerings at least here in Berlin.

Professionally, I want to get back into education, not by being a teacher since I see increasing market pressure on the teaching profession which will cause it to either morph or considerably dry up. Instead I want to get back into education by being a part of building the technological tools and service offerings as described above that will be competitive and financially sustainable in the coming years, but what and how? It's not enough to just "use Skype" but how do you sell "Skype teaching" to companies? How do you scale it so that you can create full-time employment doing that? What value do you have to add to make it attractive to companies and make a good profit doing it?

These are the questions professional English teachers should be asking themselves: how can we combine skills, share ideas, work on joint projects, develop start-ups, use the knowledge and experience we have combined with the technological tools we are learning to continue to provide quality education and earn a living doing it?

I would love to see organizations like ELTABB form and support a formal group to address these issues and thereby assist "teachers helping teachers" prepare themselves for the educational market of the coming decades which is not going to be as friendly as the educational market of the previous decades.