We’re excited to announce that we’ve just released a full introductory Spanish course for native speakers of German. The German title of the course is “Spanisch – Der leichte Einstieg” (Spanish – the easy start). Made up of twenty “Tutorials,” it offers a compact and entertaining introduction to the language in the Babbel-style, meaning a unique combination of multi-media fill-in-the-blanks, writing exercises and overall intuitive language learning. This is our first foray into Premium content: for a one-time fee of 19 euros, users can get a 20-part course that packs in a good deal of the linguistic equipment one would need for the next trip without taking up a centimeter of suitcase! A trial of the first Tutorial to get a taste of the entire course is free and non-binding.

For this premium course, we’ve teamed up with renowned German publisher Hueber. Based on Hueber’s book “Spanisch Ganz Leicht in 20 Tagen” (Spanish Made Easy in 20 Days) by Christoph Kehr, “Spanisch – Der leichte Einstieg” is just the beginning of a series of cooperations with different publishers. The rest of Babbel’s content, meanwhile, the vocabulary and writing exercises, as well as access to the website’s 250,000-strong online community, will remain free as always.

Not such a bad idea to broaden your target group by teaching them the language you are broadcasting in, right? The British Broadcasting Company – BBC – offers several services to learn and improve your English. Besides the  “The Teacher” videos – who is in his own words “a very interesting and intelligent man” explaining idioms on a whiteboard -  there are episodes of “The Flatmates“, among other things. This programme offers you a new dialogue to listen to every week (mp3) along with background information on some terms related to the show’s subject, e.g. the economic crisis. You can take part in a quiz or vote for what happens next.

The Victoria University press office speaks of Sulzberger’s work as a “revolutionary approach” – but isn’t being exposed a language and learning it bit by bit the most well known way to learn a language anyhow?

A new online learning platform – scoyo – has been up for nearly a month now in Germany. It’s a service for private lessons for kids around 12, claiming that “learning can be fun”. There is a US-version in the works for the “near future”. The core concept of scoyo is bringing the learning concepts of interactive CD/DVD-Roms online, and to integrate some social networking. Up til now there are subjects like math and biology. But besides German there are no other languages offered yet.

On the whole it is nothing groundbreakingly new, but it’s well executed. Small wonder though, as about 15 to 20 million euros have been invested in it by the one of the biggest German media conglomerates, Bertelsmann. Or at least that’s what we’ve heard. The service is now in beta and free to anyone, but the business idea is to charge a monthly fee for unlimited use. According to a study (pdf in German), more then one million young students in Germany get private tutoring for which their parents spend about 1.2 billion euros a year.

How about a glimpse into the future of online education? Stephen Dowes’ article about “The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On” is an informative read about recent trends in eLearning. It also gives quite plausible predictions for things to come. Besides statements about “informal learning” (have a look at our factsheet for all these terms) and technology trends – e.g. the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project – the most interesting part for me was the one about “Connectivism”.

The concept of a “learning theory for the digital age“, introduced by George Siemens, is based on the assumption that the amount of accessible knowledge is growing at an exponential rate: “Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.”

This summer Siemens, Dowes and some of their colleagues tried to put their words into action: At least 1,200 users enrolled in a Massive Open Online Course – MOOC – about Connecitivism. The participants used “blogs, Second Life, Page Flakes, attend[ed] UStream sessions, attend[ed] Elluminate sessions, participate[d] in discussions in Moodle forums, and so on.” Dowes sees a upcoming “determined population of ambitious, talented and self-sufficient students” educatinge themselves

But not everyone is so enthuisastic about MOOC: “It is great that the course is free and open. But is this real innovation? Are we not just reinventing mass rows of students sitting passively in tiered lecture [halls] albeit on-line? Is this just another Tayloristic model of education? Cheap – yes! Efficient – yes! Effective – perhaps not. Participation…learner support? Is the innovation technical or pedagogic?”

He is onto something: Every kind of self-organization and liberation has some neoliberal aspect to it; in this case, it is taking the responsibilty for education away from the state/society. But Dowes is more positive about that: “This will be the last generation in which education is the practice of authority, and the first where it becomes, as has always been intended by educators, an act of liberty.”

(via Mohamed Amine Chatti’s Blog and Open Education News)

In all the hullaballoo lately about the democratization of foreign language education through the internet, one issue that tends to get left by the wayside is: What happens if you want – or really need – to learn a language but don’t have access to a computer?

Under the banner of “Language is a Human Right”, the non-profit Fluenz.org, based in Hollywood, CA, has developed “El Book”, a free primer for US Spanish-speaking immigrants with absolutely no prior knowledge of the language on the bare rudiments of English. A friendly, straight-forwardly designed lesson in black-and-white printable PDF with an accompanying (though not essential) set of audio files – easily burned onto a CD – is aimed not directly at the presumed student, but rather at NGOs, churches, local and state governments who could do the duty of transferring the material to analogue and distributing it to those who would use it.