As I mentioned in my earlier post today about WiZiQ, italki also has some nice new features for its teachers underneath the Christmas tree.
italki has been very busily working on their marketplace recently but the features they launched today are more affecting the overall usability and the booking process on the platform.
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 one of my last blog posts I wrote about the partnership announcement of Livemocha.com and Pearson.com.
One day later I came across the announcement of FriendsAbroad.com that they are now a part of the language learning platform Babbel.com.
Then LanguagesOutThere.com, a content provider for ESL material, announced a partnership with italki.com.
And finally this morning I saw the following tweet of Jon Bischke, CEO of eduFire.com:
Ok, this tweet might just be a joke, it probably is but still I think there is some kind of a trend towards teaming up between different companies in the education sector which can complement each other. Or is it to beef up for a weak economy in 2009 and to show some muscles to the competitors?
In addition to their language exchange program italki.com is offering a new service since last week. You can now apply as a language teacher or tutor.
Teachers are defined as professionel instructors who already worked as language teachers, tutors are native speakers who share their knowledge on a paid basis, so basically the paid version of a language exchange. Continue reading
