Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Livemocha and Pearson Announce Partnership for Online Language Learning

I covered Livemocha just after they made a launch/investment presentation at a west coast developers conference in 2007. That blog post is here.

Pearson, the world’s leading education company, and Livemocha, the world’s largest online language learning community, announced today a strategic agreement to co-develop a new, direct-to-consumer, conversational English language learning experience available on Livemocha’s online platform with a global community of over two million members.

1 comment:

JasonOutThere said...

Hi, the above announcement has been greeted by much of the press as a groundbreaking and first of its kind development.

I think it should be pointed out that Pearson are yet to build their materials for the phenomenon that is language social-networking but my small company has been working on this for years, and published over 600 hours of materials specially designed for langusges social-networkers and skype users on our website last December.

We are the only company in the world with such materials and we have been through a torrid 8 year development cycle involving thousands of hours of teaching with paying students, tweaking and editing and recently, at the same time as Pearson and Livemocha were preparing to say they were going to do something, we did it by partnering with Itakli.com, one of Livemocha's biggest competitors.

All of the information and some examples of our unique materials are here http://www.prleap.com/pr/134585/, and have been described by one respected ELT blogger from Germany as 'being like Guttenberg's invention of the printing press' in the potential to change global language teaching, a $20bn market (by Livemocha's estimate as reported on Globalwatchtower.com).

Kind regards

Jason