How to create a language course that meets your students' needs

Is it possible to create a language course for all of your students? As a dress could not fit every size, equally when referring to learning approaches we come to one size does not fit all, and does not fit forever.

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Let’s just stop for one second and consider that there are 2 billion second language learners in the world. Do we really think that this massive amount of people share and find effective the same learning method? Of course not.

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As a consequence, the job of language teachers is complicated. If you want to know how to grow your language business online, it becomes crucial to identify the learning approach that best suits the needs of their own students.

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When starting a language school, it’s important to set up courses that will work for different students. 

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1. Choose a language course type

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When designing a language course, teachers and academic directors needs to consider four main parameters that affect the structure of the course itself: 

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• Time: how much time will my students need to allocate to complete this course?
• Price: how expensive would the course be?
• Lessons: only asynchronous, only synchronous or a combination of two?
• Personalization: which is the level of personalization will I give to students?

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Types of language courses

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The combination of these parameters lead to the creation of courses with completely different features and structure, that therefore address different target students:

• Self-paced Courses: Students learn at their own time and schedule. Being these courses fully asynchronous and with no level of personalization, they are usually free or sold at a low price. Their advantage is that there is no limit in terms of student enrollment. A few examples of self-paced courses? DuoLingo, Udemy, Coursera and LinkedIn Learning.

• Tailor-made Courses: 1-to-1 language courses. The curriculum is based on the students’ needs and iterated according to their feedback. Since these courses implies a maximum level of personalization, they are usually pretty expensive and their length depends on students’ aims and progress. They are the best if target business people who are learning the language for very specific needs.

• Mixed courses: a melting pot of synchronous lessons (i.e. real-time interactions) and asynchronous ones (i.e. learners study at their own pace). Mixed courses are halfway between tailor-made courses and self-paced courses in terms of both price, time and level of personalization. 

• Cohort-based courses: groups of learners advances through the material together - in “cohorts” - with hands-on, feedback based learning at the core. The cohort-based courses provide students advantages in term of team working, social motivation and feedback coming from both the teacher and their peers. Being collective, the level of personalization is not high and the schedule is fixed, therefore CBCs results pretty affordable.

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2. Identify your language student persona

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For example, if your target students are teens who need to pass a language exam maybe the CBCs are the best, since they imply social interaction and are not very expensive. On the other hand, if you address working people who need to learn a language for their specific working field, you probably prefer to offer mixed courses or tailor-made courses, based on the level of personalization they need and the resources (time and money) those target students have. 

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Discover more about how find the perfect language course for your students with this our webinar.

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And now, how to switch from theory to practice? Or rather, how to really create such kind of language courses?

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The creation of language courses that meet the needs of your target students can be easy, if you have the right technology. You can find many tools online to create courses for students - from Teachable to Learnworld, or combining Google Calendar, Zoom and your own website. But these are all tools that you would have to team up, which might be messy and confusing for both your students and yourself.

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3. Create a language course with the right tools

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Why don’t you get the complete package with Edugo.AI’s one-stop platform, that natively supports the creation of all the four courses described above?

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Edugo.AI Platform differs from all others as it is specific for language teaching and learning. Its power is to generate sets of gamified language exercises to master any skill in learning a new language - vocabulary, speaking, listening, grammar, reading, writing - starting from the content of a live class or from some language material (video, audio, ppt or pdf) that you upload on the platform. 

Those exercises can be easily used for any of your lessons - synchronous and asynchronous - and combined in the language course that better fits your students’ needs - self-paced, tailor-made, mixed or cohort-based.

And you don’t have to choose only one! You can create all the courses that you need with no limits within the same Edugo platform. Just choose the desired structure, populate the course with your own content, set up the go-to-market price and go online!