I had made a vow not to link to AJ for a month or so, but his latest post makes this impossible. Why? Because his take on teachers as free agents is exactly why we’re building our software.

The education field is beginning to resemble the sports world. Teachers can be free agents too. Forget the days of tenure. Forget the days of working 20 years for the same sorry bureaucracy. While some bemoan the loss of “job security”… I see this as a very positive development. Sure, the mediocre clock-punchers are losing “security”. But great opportunities are also opening.

These opportunities boost the demand for and the power of passionate, engaged, interesting teachers…As I survey the TESOL field, for example…I find it almost laughable. The standards are incredibly low. The established field of public and private programs is ripe for destruction. How much longer will boring, grammar-translation based, unpleasant, and ineffective programs be able to survive?

The passionate and engaged teachers that AJ points to are exactly who we’re building the English360 web application for. The learning, teaching, and admin support in our application will allow independent Business English teachers to nurture learner autonomy, connect with P2P communities of practice, and support improved on-the-job language performance by their students. One of our goals is that the English360 application will emancipate these teachers from mediocre schools that take half the fees the client company pays, yet add no value to what happens in the classroom (or, more commonly, actually hinder teacher performance). Another of our goals is that it is free for teachers.

I was discussing this vision with a group of independent BE school directors in São Paolo last year, and they were concerned about the role they would play in this new world of bureaucracy-busting technology. One director asked “but if your application will do all this, what will teachers need us for?”. I said “Take a minute and think of what you do that directly helps your teachers help your students, and that’s your answer. And there’s a need for clients to have a single point of contact. But if your primary role is sales, administration and infrastructure, you’re history”.

So what’s the timetable for our software? We’re hoping for a beta launch of the complete, 5-section application for early 2006. Right now we’re knee-deep in interface design for the second of the five sections, and finishing up the back-end coding for the first. That means we’ll have a working version of the first section in about two weeks. It’s a needs analysis, the first step when designing an effective business English program.

So I’d like to take this opportunity to recruit a few teachers to try out the English360 needs analysis. If you’d like to be the first to test drive some cutting-edge learning technology, then drop us an email, and we’ll send you a user name and a password. In October you’ll spend an hour or so playing with a very cool web app, finding bugs, and telling us what you’d improve.