Breaking news: English360 is now independent

September 7th, 2011
by Cleve Miller


As we announced to our customers last week, English360 is now independent of Cambridge University Press, and we are now a wholly owned and fully autonomous organization. This is, of course, very exciting for all of us at English360, and not just from a business perspective: it’s exciting because it’s the next step in fulfilling our shared vision of where education is going, and how teachers will use technology.

How it all began

English360 was founded 6 years ago as a tiny, teacher-led start-up with big plans but few resources. We presented an alpha version of our web application at BESIG in Berlin in 2007 (it went live on the web for the first time the night before the session!). We had a clear vision, but as a tiny start-up we faced huge challenges when entering into a global ELT community dominated by big players.

BESIG Berlin 2007: The English360 launch session

BESIG Berlin 2007: The English360 launch session

Now, as it happened, Cambridge University Press was scouting new technology at BESIG that year. They attended our session, and to make an extremely long story short, English360 and Cambridge entered into a joint venture, creating Cambridge-English360 Ltd. It was an inspired partnership for a range of reasons: Cambridge got some cutting-edge technology, together with the team that built it. English360 received:

  • a wide range of Cambridge courses and resources to re-purpose in the platform
  • support from the global Cambridge sales teams
  • financial support (we were now able to pay ourselves a salary)
  • co-branding with the strongest brand in ELT

The partnership was successful. Together with Cambridge, we launched over 50 courses in the platform. We signed up thousands of users in dozens of countries and on every continent. We picked up the David Riley Award for Innovation and were shortlisted for an ELTon. We made the software more powerful and added some extremely cool content authoring templates. Many challenges remained, but we had managed to gain traction towards our goal.

So what happened?

And of course what happened is what always happens: this very success stressed the organization. We’d proven the concept: an open platform that gives teachers and schools unprecedented ability to work with publisher content, author their own content, and combine the two into personalized courses, to be delivered online, in class, or as blended learning.

And, now having proven the concept, we were inundated with new ideas and new projects for the platform, from ourselves, from our partner, and from customers. We worked hard to continue to prioritize and execute, but soon both partners realized that we were in danger of losing focus.

So we mutually decided to allow both partners to use the platform as needed, enabling each to dedicate the focus necessary for their own projects. It made perfect sense, and then about a week later we all realized that at this point there was really no reason for a joint venture any more, and that it would be better for both partners to maintain a strong strategic alliance, but without having the complications of a formal joint venture.

So that is what we’ve accomplished: an amicable separation that jettisons the problems but maintains what works. Cambridge University Press deserves tremendous credit for the enlightened, collaborative, teacher-focused business philosophy that provided the flexibility for this new relationship. English360 is now independent, but with the content agreements in place for the all the Cambridge resources currently in the system, and new agreements for new Cambridge content as well (we’re launching the first new course in October).

What does this mean for English360 going forward?

For us, independence has some intriguing advantages, some of which you can probably guess. Everyone on the English360 team is tremendously excited about this next step in our progress. We’ll discuss these advantages in “Part 2” of his post, coming soon.

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BESIG 2009

November 25th, 2009
by Cleve Miller


Attended the BESIG conference in Poznan last weekend, with fellow English360′ers Paul Colbert and Brian Anderson. As always it was great to actually meet with colleagues that had previously been only virtual: met Karenne and Anne face to face finally. Discussed an interesting new project that Cornelia and Paul have cooked up. Met with lots of folks that I only see once a year.

Vicki Hollett’s plenary and subsequent session were great. My take away was her discussion on teaching functional language for authenticity when establishing relationships, whether they be business or social relationships. Main point: those nice lists of functional phrases we have in BE coursebooks need an upgrade.

Another highlight was Jeremy Day’s session on “Results-focused ESP”.   Jeremy gave us an observation that was new to me. I’m paraphrasing here but he was discussing the question “Who is the most important person in the learning process?” and we were all thinking “the student” (as opposed to teacher-centered, or materials-centered classes of course). Jeremy’s point was that another perspective, especially in ESP, is to see that the most important person isn’t even in the classroom. If we are teaching English for nursing, the most important person is actually the patient, who will be communicating with the nurse (our student). If we are teaching English for students who work in a call center, the most important person is the customer, who will need our student to resolve an issue with a product. This expansion of who we prioritize as stakeholders in the learning process is spot on.

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“…this is it. The big one.”

June 17th, 2009
by Cleve Miller


NYU Professor Clay Shirky (via email from Diane Tucker):

“I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted ‘the whole world is watching.’ Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.

Traditional media operates as source of information not as a means of coordination. It can’t do more than make us sympathize. Twitter makes us empathize. It makes us part of it. Even if it’s just retweeting, you’re aiding the goal that dissidents have always sought: the awareness that the ouside world is paying attention.

From Nico Pitney in The Huffington Post.

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Collaboration and 360° content creation.

May 20th, 2009
by Cleve Miller


The traditional publisher model of expert authored, professionally edited language teaching course books is often necessary, but seldom sufficient for optimal learning.

Although they are a wonder of high quality teaching content, scope and sequence, and production values, course books have their issues. They may take 3-5 years from conception to classroom, and are usually designed for general appeal to a passive mass audience. They are expensive to produce. Authors are far from the needs of different cultures, different students, and different teachers. Contentious topics are avoided.

Thus, the problem is keeping content relevant, current and personalized. Today, slang, technology, and cultural references evolve more quickly now than before. Content and references have lost validity when they are 5 years old (and often when they are 5 months old). And they may have not been personally relevant to the student anyway, since a “common denominator” approach invariably leaves many students yawning.

So what’s a teacher to do? Well, most teachers have the solution: they supplement the core course book to one degree or another. They supplement with web resources, authentic material, teacher- and school-developed content, content from other course books and resources, and activities and projects that teachers come up with on the fly.

And, critically, they supplement (or, for the Dogme folk, replace) with content brought to the learning process by the students themselves.

If a teacher has the skills, resources, and experience, the result can be an optimal mix of pre-defined language content, and personally, culturally, and professionally relevant and engaging content.
content-box0015

But, it’s not easy. For most teachers, we’re talking analog: photocopiers, tape, manila envelopes and file cabinets. For other teachers it’s a mind-boggling succession of web 2.0 apps, user names, and passwords…each one cool and useful but scattered around in info silos throughout the net.  What each approach has in common is a lack of time to implement it.

Today’s digital technologies will soon open up possibilities for meeting these challenges. Group authoring platforms and collaboration tools will allow groups of teachers (and students) to work together, pool their energy, and create materials and lesson plans that in terms of both quantity (definitely) and quality (optimally) were formerly only possible from publishers. Print-on-demand, e-learning, and PDFs provide a delivery mechanism that again was previously only available to large publishers.

Large-scale collaboration will lead to the same result in language learning material that Wikipedia brought to encyclopedias: a dramatically wider range of topics (Wikipedia has 10 times the articles of a traditional encyclopedia). This long tail of content will provide the custom course work that will result in radically personalized learning – we’ll have as many courses as we have students. And as we’ve seen with Wikipedia, it’ll be fast and it’ll be cheap. And most importantly, what it will be is open.

So, the coming collaborative content has many advantages: speed, relevance, flexibility, personalization, the capacity to mix authored, student-generated, authentic and web content into a more rounded approach. Through collaboration, this “360° content creation” adopts and adapts content from a wide range of sources, leading to learner-centered content that transforms passive learners into active, and a mass audience into personalization.

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Excellent perspective on the future of “books”

April 22nd, 2009
by Cleve Miller


This made me think about the “Future of Coursebooks” thread on the IATEFL Cardiff forums. Steven Johnson outlines where he sees e-book technology taking us, and how it will change some of our most basic ideas about reading and reading behaviors. I think his analysis shows clearly the limits of the “one content - many media” re-purposing, where an ELT publisher takes print content, or CD-ROM content, and puts it on the web: while it’s often OK, the content wasn’t developed to take advantage of the social and collaborative nature of the web. Thus, opportunity lost; it’s like turning off the picture on the TV and using it as a radio.

Anyway, Johnson outlines where ebook technology will take us. In bullets:

1) Reading will change from solitary to social:

As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

2) Book-length content will become granular:

Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters. This fragmentation sounds unnerving — yet another blow to the deep-focus linearity of the print-book tradition.

3) Google PageRank will fuel sales:

Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.

Fascinating stuff. The “social” and “granular” themes are what English360 is all about, and I think that this will bring us a step closer to the goal of radically personalized learning learning content.

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Community as curriculum: the “rhizomatic model” of learning

April 14th, 2009
by Cleve Miller


“In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions.”

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New blog find

April 14th, 2009
by Cleve Miller


Peter Thwaites in Oman has some interesting conversation happening at his (new?) blog:  A Look at Language Teaching.

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Capitalism 2.0

April 9th, 2009
by Cleve Miller


Interesting article by Nassim Taleb that would be great input for a class for financial English. And here’s a blog post discussing it.

Hat tip to Andrew. If you go to the Taleb article from his post you won’t need to register at the FT.

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Making coursebooks more relevant

April 7th, 2009
by Cleve Miller


Very useful post (as always) from Karenne Sylvester over at Kalinago English.

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Are you fluent in “corporate-speak”

September 24th, 2008
by Cleve Miller


Here’s a cute online game that points to the empty sloganeering of corporate PR folk.

Might be a fun activity for some business English students. You could put them in groups and have each group discuss/decide on an answer, then compare/explain answers, then check actual answers. Then have them make on for their company or for their department or position. For fun they could do a ambiguous “sloganeering” style (like the examples) then maybe a direct and clear explanation.

You could contextualize it as a writing task to practice the “clear” and “concise” goals of biz writing/email writing.

Sadly, I got 7 of 8 correct.

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