Skype, social networks and language learning
There’s lots of start-ups in the language learning space, mostly variations on the social networking and Skype models. Most of them aren’t very good though, and many miss the point entirely. What, imho, are they doing wrong?
Medium and message
These are early days for Learning 2.0. There’s still an overall lack of understanding of how new media enable learning. Designing content for a podcast, cellphone, or web application is a new discipline with new challenges, but a lot of the content that I see is simply old-style content stuffed into the new channels. (Content decisions are frequently coming from software developers, rather than teachers.) Simply putting learners in front of some content and expecting them to learn isn’t enough. You would not, for example, film a newspaper and put it on TV - the medium determines the message. In the same way, learning content has to be created, written, and designed for the medium through which it is consumed. Too often that isn’t happening.
You can usually spot this problem on the interface, but I also got to see it up-close when I recently visited a multi-million dollar start-up (language instruction again) and met their leadership team. The team didn’t have anyone with any real concept of how learning was to happen on the platform. The result will almost certainly be a content dump.
Misunderstanding social networks
I think there’s a lot of confusion about the role of social networks (SNs) in learning. One common start-up approach is to simply create a SN (with random extras thrown in) and call it a language learning community. This is naieve, as quite often there’s neither a business, nor a learning case for it: SN features in and of themselves have no intrinsic value or interest. Nor do you create value for learners simply by allowing them to register and sort through random lists of people who are equally at a loss as to how to learn a language. They need more guidance than that.
Note: I use the Facebook SN to connect with professionals in my field. It definitely has value. But Facebook is a destination site so the value is in the connections. In a language learning context, by contrast, the SN is a feature, not a destination.
There’s another class of language instruction sites that are being called SNs but aren’t. Mango Languages offers free lessons - 100 of them translated into various languages. It’s not bad as a free resource but it’s kind of 1996 in its approach - static lessons, a closed system, highly structured and didactic, heavy on the software, etc. No idea where the SN tag comes from there, but their press release assures us that Mango is ‘quite literally opening up a world of possibilities to people worldwide’. I think that’s more naievete (and poor word chioice) than arrogance and it says something about the maturity of the genre.
Global ambitions
Another tendency I’ve seen is aiming way too wide. The hope is obviously to create VC appeal and consolidate a global market, etc. English is the obvious market, since there are millions of English learners around the world and no dominant market player. (That’s because there is no single addressable, global market for English - there are hundreds of them.) Yet even this is oftentimes not ambitious enough for some. I’ve seen some fairly zany collections of people with the most wide ranging, if not irreconcilable, agendas in some of these places. This willingness to throw focus to the wind is evidenced in plenty of other ways, for example, the music videos, particularly when they’re not formatted for learning and could be found in dozens of other places.
Skype - leaving it to chance
I’m seeing a lot of new Skype-based start-ups. Again, the hope is to consoildate a global audience, generate advertising, or take a cut of tuition. However, the act of connecting people is now a very easy thing to - online platforms of this sort have become commodities, so it’s hard to wring value out of it. Most see one of two options. The first is to connect teachers with learners and take a cut of the tuition. But teaching over Skype is difficult, and not terribly rewarding, even for experienced practitioners. It is and will remain a skill that is relatively scarce, and Skype doesn’t allow you to scale that up, as lessons tend to be one-on-one. Whether you plan to make money from advertising on the platform (ouch!) or take a cut of the tuition, it will require one hell of a lot of teachers to reach any scale.
The second option is to allow to individuals to create language exchanges, i.e. no teachers in the equation. The problem here is that there is no revenue, apart, again, from advertising. But worse still is the fact that you have amateur teachers, with cross-cultural and language barriers to overcome, and no accountability to speak of. I’m afraid this is a case of leaving it too much to chance.
Clearly these new market entrants will mature and iterate, but we do have a ways to go at this point. But it’s also interesting that many of these iniatives are being tagged as if they were new, and original ideas. In fact, however, by September of 2005, we had put into practice all of the main ideas behind web 2.0, the social networking, and yes, even a Skype-based business model into practice. Both ChinesePod and SpanishPod are fully-fledged communities of practice that have devloped the elements of social networking way beyond what many of the start-ups are now grappling with. I might be biased but I at least I can claim to speak from experience!
Ken Carroll
January 15th, 2008 at 1:05 am
Ken,
I question how people can build a successful Internet language business around just social networks. I agree with everything you said about SNs above. I saw too many pre-Internet “language exchanges” fail to now believe that anything exactly like that could work on a global scale (rarely would an exchange last longer than a couple of months and, take note, most were fueled by some kind of personal attraction).
Perhaps “Internet language exchanges” can be made to work but my gut tells me not in the form that your examples are taking it.
And in terms of Skype, it alone isn’t enough to underpin anything more than a cottage industry. Presently Skype is nothing more than a tool to teach privately, albeit one that can reach into any corner of the world. To scale larger a business must combine Skype with many other offerings.
The best way it seems, as in the case of Chinesepod, is to start with strong pedagogy and flow with your customers in the direction of joyful learning.
I wouldn’t stop looking over your shoulder however Ken.
January 15th, 2008 at 2:02 am
Ken, you’ve mentioned a few methods that are not commercially viable, but could become popular student activities. For example, free language exchange in the form of frequent casual chat via Skype.
I don’t think many students are finding this successful yet, but give us time and we’ll get the knack. Say you get a response from one in ten people you approach on Skype, only one in ten of them contacts you again, only one in ten of them sustains beyond three or four contact sessions, and only one in ten of them develops into an ongoing mutually supportive session. It sounds bad, but it’s simply a matter of working through the numbers, and with experience you can become more efficient at establishing the most sustainable contacts quickly. It might become something we do much better in the future.
So what I’m getting at is that perhaps soon we’ll have a whole lot of unprofitable things that students can do themselves for free, and students will get the knack of exploiting them. Then it will remain the task for businesses to concentrate on what only they can provide, without wasting long term investment in expensive services which students can get, almost as well, by themselves.
How do you predict that something students need to buy today will be exchanged by them for free in six months? It’s easy if you’re as net-savvy as the target group. Unfortunately most teachers and business people are not, but they think they can do it anyway.
I think that is why there is such a huge difference between the success of some online language services and the failure of most others. That difference is only going to grow as the students’ net use matures rapidly, while so many teachers remain rooted in the real world, with false allusions about their restricted toe-dipping in the net.
If you are able to understand and see what’s coming down the road, you are in a position to facilitate what you know the students will want to do, without investing too heavily or trying to trap students into dependency long after the paid service is superfluous. You can ride on that, if you know how and when to let go, by getting plenty of net cred for helping to establish and support a free student community activity and letting them go for it. But you must be willing to let go. Meanwhile the solid cash can be better invested on those things the students won’t ever manage to do themselves. That scope will become slightly smaller over time, but more intense, and of greater value.
But would it work? One company has done this already. Not only was it educationally effective and profitable, it also earned them unusually high respect and rabid loyalty. Thanks Ken.
January 15th, 2008 at 4:50 am
Michael,
Thx for the supportive words. I too remembner the language exchange phenomenon (or was that ‘non-phenomenon’?) so I have my doubts about doing it over Skype. I didn’t have time/space to expand on that in my post but it is a shaky basis for a business. That’s not to say that someone won’t figure it out - anything can happen - but there isn’t anything out there that I’d call original. You mentioned ‘art’ in a previous discussion and I think there’s some truth in that. You know something fresh when you see it and I would argue that we haven’t seen anything really new since, er, September 2005.
Aunty,
Great points. You’re right that learners may give enough support to these things so that they eventually morph into a viable model. Iteration is a great thing, so never say never. And I am indeed looking over my shoulder.
Ken Carroll
January 15th, 2008 at 5:32 am
I tried livemocha briefly and appeared to be able to find the odd potential exchange contact with a little filtering. However the model of submitting excercises and allowing your friends/community evaluate them left me cold. As you hinted Ken I noticed that the Chinese friends I had often got misleading help from people who considered themselves fluent in English but were not native speakers (one was berated for using the phrase “best loved” in a dialog about her favorite thing, the phrase was not only appropriate but actually more advanced than the stock answers).
The real problem for livemocha though was that once you make a good contact it is actually very easy to just exchange emails and take the exchange off their site. I can search through and organise messages better with my new partner on gmail than I can using their messaging service and skype or googletalk is better than their voice and video tools.
Sites that allow you to connect up, do have merits (although there is a lot of personal filtering to perform), but where do they go from there? Once you have a good connection, what makes it worthwhile to continue the dialog on that site.
Recently I have learned that “your website is not your product” it is the content and data that matter. Every time I apply this principle it seems to hold true (although there are bound to be exceptions). Many of these startups are overly focused on their website and intend to rely on keeping people there.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:35 am
Auntie,
Wise words and of course economics is the gorilla in the closet that we rarely talk about on this forum. It is, in the end, the key to making everything both possible and sustainable.
The language learning “market” contains two groups IMHO. It is made up of those that want to LEARN and those that want to PRACTICE. Over the life of a language learner these two needs will sometimes perfectly coincide. Usually however a learner will feel a greater attraction (often quite unknowingly) to one or the other of these two groups.
I believe that a person is willing to pay more (sometimes much more) to be a member of the learning group than to be a member of the practice group. Online SN groups or what I like to think of as very efficient language exchanges will always gravitate to a low cost model. The thinking behind this can be summed up in the netcitizens credo, “why should I have to pay to participate when my contributions create value”. A very interesting question and one that each site answers differently.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:45 am
Ken,
had a fantastic night out last Friday, relatively speaking! I do hope we can meet again before I leave Saturday. Are you guys on again this Friday?
January 15th, 2008 at 6:25 am
Ken, interesting post which voices some of the thoughts I have had over the last few months. Every few weeks or so another one of these sites pops out of the woodwork. Even New Oriental is now in on the game. My feeling though, having signed up to several of these, is that most are in the experimental stage and are feeling their way around. One or two of them I visit relatively frequently.
All this activity is good news for language learners who can enjoy a lot of content for free and connect with different groups of people. I currently tend to steer towards the China-based sites, Chinesepod and China-8.com, the former for the excellent podcasts and the latter simply because they seem to have something new every time I visit.
Looking at the Alexa rankings for all these sites is interesting - you have a leader in Chinesepod with one or two of these sites really playing catch up. While Alexa rankings in themselves don’t mean much, they do give a pretty good idea of which sites have traction and as such can be considered to be on the right track.
My take on these sites, including Chinesepod, is that as long as there isn’t any clear category winner a la Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Flickr etc. we are going to see manor more sites coming up. I am almost half-tempted to start one myself. Kidding!
January 15th, 2008 at 7:24 am
Dave,
Alexa rankings aren’t the most trustworthy. Either way we dropped the ‘www’ from our URL some months ago and sent us way down on Alexa. With 250,000 unique visitors per month, however, I think we probably get more traffic than any other Chinese learning site.
Prince Roy,
Nice pun. I think it might be possible to school you relativits again on Friday evening!!! This stuff is definitely best done over beers, though. I look forward to it.
Ken Carroll
January 17th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Hello Ken,
Great posting on “Skype, social networks and language learning.” I couldn’t agree with you more that in order to make any serious money on individual lessons over such a medium as Skype will require a large of amount of teachers. I am in the business of online English lessons over Skype and I feel that this challenge is the ultimate goal to achieve in being a success. My company (TalktoCanada.com) is just in the beginning stages of development and with time I don’t doubt a few definite winners will appear, lets just hope it’s myself and not somebody else.
Thanks once again for the well written article, it is great to hear somebody talk about the underlying problems and solutions to SN 2.0.
Marc Anderson (Manager TalktoCanada.com)
January 17th, 2008 at 8:20 am
Marc,
Iteration is the cornerstone of any internet business. I think the genre will mature and we will see some great solutions over time. I wish you good luck.
Ken Carroll
January 18th, 2008 at 5:04 am
Marc,
Your site says TalktoCanada.com is THE leader in on-line English language instruction. Is this merely the marketing department talking (and boy do those guys like to talk!) or do you have a real, measurable reason for saying this?
January 20th, 2008 at 3:53 am
Hello Michael,
When I first made the statement “The leader in on-line English language instruction” it was meant to convey a sense of our company leading and innovating the way in which online English learning is done. The statement is not to say that we have the most amount of students. The marketing department is really a one person team made up of myself so I do the best I can.
Thanks for the question, nobody has ever brought it up before,
Marc Anderson
January 21st, 2008 at 1:04 am
Hey Mark,
Two decades of teaching English has made me quite sensitive to the article “the”. A lifetime spent as a consumer has made leery of how it is used in business environments.
IMHO I suggest you put every “the” to the acid test and use that process to improve as a business.
January 22nd, 2008 at 6:04 pm
I agree that these online language exchange/teaching networks are incomplete and don’t do a great job at teaching a language. I do, however, think that they are a wonderful language learning tool. I think that once a learner gets to the intermediate level, he/she needs to have consistent contact with the language in order to move up to the next level. It usually isn’t feasible for people, especially adults, to spend years in another country in order to gain fluency but it is quite possible for them to spend a couple of hours an evening webcaming with people who speak their target language. Steve Kaufmann (www.thelinguist.blogs.com) heavily stresses the importance of learner independence and I think that these networks facilitate the learner’s ability to practice the language on his/her terms in a similar way that CPod’s podcasts do. Like it or not, these networks are part of the future of language learning.
January 27th, 2008 at 5:28 am
> (Content decisions are frequently coming
> from software developers, rather than
> teachers.) ”
I think this is actually off-target. The problem isn’t a lack of pedagogical input into site design so much as its irrelevant. Web 2.0 VC expectations are for rapid-growth with a focus on advertising-revenues.
Since margins on online advertising are very small without economies of scale, why would any site in this situation do something that requires actual knowledge of languages. So we have language-agnostic sites which are generalizable to students of all languages and useful to students of few.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:49 am
Hi Ken,
My company, Live-English.net started in 2006 when there were only a few players on the market offering English lessons by Skype. Nowadays Skype is extremely reliable and for a lot of students, learning through Skype was their first opportunity to speak to a native-English teacher (most of my students are from Europe). And apart from that, there are clearly lots of advantages to learn languages this way.
You wrote this article a year and a half ago. I would be interested to see what you think about it now.