EDUKWEST Ep. 61 with Travis Millman of EnglishCentral

In this week’s EDUKWEST I interview Travis Millman, VP of product for EnglishCentral Inc. Although still quite concentrated on the Asian market, I think it’s a nice product worth having a look at from both teacher and student side.

EnglishCentral consists of three main areas, one is to watch authentic videos dealing with different topics such as politics or entertainment. Second is to learn all relevant vocabulary, also structured according to topics for instance introductions or culture. The third element is to learn to speak or more specifically how to pronounce words.

Looking from a student perspective, I like that it’s pretty customizable and that I don’t have to watch this or that video but define my fields of interest and thus get only relevant lessons for me.

Read more and watch the Interview on EDUKWEST →

Languagelab secures $1 million funding for English City on Second Life

Shiv Rajendran, Director at Languagelab and a regular on my webcast review:ed shared some exciting news with me today. The London based startup behind the virtual town of English City on Second Life has closed a $1 million funding round.

In their approach of bringing English learning and teaching into the virtual world of Second Life Languagelab is one of the most innovative startups in education 2.0 .

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TelCos teaming up with Education Startups in Asia. Model for the Rest of the World?

A couple days ago I read on TechCrunch that the Japanese NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation) invested $1 million in the ESL startup EnglishCentral.

Back in February Nokia (not really a TelCo, I know) and Pearson signed a partnership that would preload ESL learning content from Mobiledu on all new Nokia mobile phones on the Chinese market turning each phone into a mobile learning device.

And last but not least NTT also acquired a 29.7% stake in goFluent back in January. I will interview Christophe Ferrandou, Founder and CEO of goFluent, on EDUKWEST tomorrow. The company offers business English courses via telephone and internet to customers worldwide and is the European leader in this sector.

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Mingoville shows the Classroom of the Future

And I really hope that this future is not too far away. Mingoville, to my mind one of the most innovative education 2.0 companies and my declared favorite of 2009, just shared some amazing videos on its YouTube channel, showing a group of children engaging with the Mingoville universe via different devices in a classroom setup.

Those videos show how the ESL class of the future could (should!) look like. The best thing, Mingoville is only using technology that is already mainstream.

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Shocking: YongoPal plans to make Money

With an unfair move towards its competitors YongoPal won the big price of $25k in the Business Plan competition. Their plan for YongoPal is making money from the beginning by charging its customers. Can you believe that? Charging your customers for a service?

All joking aside, YongoPal the start up from Seattle that connects Korean students with native speakers in the US won the UW Business plan competition although they were the black horse in the race according to Christopher Griffin, one of the judges.

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