The title of the latest italki Press release is quite a statement:
italki Partners with Eleutian to Offer US‐Certified Teachers and SpeakENG Content “Powered by Pearson®”
Pearson, does it ring a bell? Exactly, Pearson announced a partnership with Livemocha a couple of month ago. You can read my post about it over here.
But to me the fact that italki is calling themselves “the italki Marketplace” is even more interesting. So lets have a look on the news from Shanghai.
In the past weeks I exchanged a couple of emails with Kevin Chen, Co-Founder of italki and I had to admit that I had never really understood the concept he was following during the past months. This partnership and the term “italki Marketplace” eventually lifted the clouds.
But first things first. Who or what is Eleutian?
Eleutian Technology is the premier, global provider of language teaching which pairs an evidence‐based curriculum and one‐on‐one conversation lessons with certified American school teachers.
All Eleutian teachers are past and current public school teachers and university professors that have at least 5 years of actual teaching experience. They also have to complete an additional 33 hours of specialized training before they work with SpeakENG students.
italki members can now purchase the Pearson powered SpeakEng Course directly on the italki homepage using their italki credits. They can subscribe for one month or a whole year for $6 or $16. In both packages a live 15 minute session with an Eleutian teacher is included.
Which leads us to the Eleutian one-on-one session. italki members have the choice between an 8 minute trial lesson at $1.50 and 4 and 24 lesson packages at $20 and $110. Again, italki members pay with their italki credits.
You can get a complete overview of the offer on this site.
Now this is really exciting but as I said at the beginning what makes me really excited is the revival of and old friend of mine: the marketplace idea.
I never really understood the need of converting your money into a virtual currency. The italki credit, or ITC, converts $1 to 10 ITC. Of course, I understood that this is good for the company itself to get the payment upfront as every member has to load the virtual account with ITCs before he or she could book a lesson. It doesn’t really make sense if you are “only” offering teaching by tutors or teachers. There are other possibilities to get cash flow: selling packages like Myngle or offering a flatrate like eduFire with the SuperPass.
But with opening the italki Marketplace to companies and schools it suddenly all comes together. Back in February this year I wrote in a post about Livemocha that they plan to offer a one stop solution for language learners by offering their stand alone content mixed with live lessons with a teacher or tutor.
italki now did exactly this: they are offering their members the possibility to
1. learn on their own with the community generated content (Knowledge, Resources)
2. do language exchange with other members (Language Partners, Groups)
3. buy private tutoring sessions with tutors or teachers on the marketplace with your ITCs (Language Teachers)
4. buy quality content and courses with your ITCs (Language Courses, Marketplace)
5. buy private tutoring sessions with certified teachers with your ITCs (Marketplace)
All on one platform, all with one single payment method.
And now imagine other companies and schools join the marketplace offering new content and languages. This will attract more teachers, too because a marketplace with such an offer should naturally attract students like bees round a honeypot. Did I mention that those teachers can offer their own courses besides their single lessons?
Quoting the italki blog:
By creating an ecosystem for language learning, we believe everyone benefits: students, independent teachers, language training companies, and application developers.
Students benefit by having more choices. They can pay for premium services, or use the free community generated ones. Students are able to share information about different service providers and make informed choices. Students are also able to pick and choose a combination of services that may be useful to them. Most of all, a central location helps students find online providers of language education.Teachers and companies benefit by having an active market with demand for their service. Companies and teachers can reach out to students around the world, and transact without having to deal with individual payment issues. Quality teachers and companies also benefit by having their reputation socially confirmed by their customers.
Bottom line: great move of italki. I was always wondering what they were cooking down there all the time with such an experienced team of managers and advisors. Now I know. And I like it.
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