eSpok - Company blog

The German training industry is at a low point at the moment. One company after another is cutting its training budget. Training and education is the lowest priority right now.

Does it make sense to just stop all training activities for months? Can training costs be reduced in the long term by taking a 6 month break? Wasn’t the whole economic crisis the result of short term thinking and the short term maximizing of profits?

One of my key lessons out of the crisis is the importance of long term thinking. I do believe that education and training are one of the core components of success for individuals and for society. Contributing to making education as efficient and available as possible is a great driving force and motivation every day.

Two weeks ago we launched our new Learning Management System (LMS) for companies. The eSpok LMS will provide a virtual workplace for every employee. Different e-learning tools as well as access to all kinds of training material are available at any moment. Progress tracking and cooperation tools will help to follow and optimize the individual’s learning progress.

We strongly hope that our Learning platform will help companies to be able to offer training and education to every employee at any moment.

As a person passionate about education I am very interested in the question “How will education look in 5 years?”

Since I co-founded eSpok together with my friend and partner Francois Xavier around 2 years ago I have been wondering how strong Internet based learning can improve the existing educational model. Advantages like more “flexible” and more “convenient” are obvious but is it really as efficient as, or even more efficient than face to face training? What about the aspect of social learning: are a lot of people not going to schools to socialize?

Recently I spent a lot of time in China and got motivated to learn Mandarin. As my time is extremely limited I decided to take 30min of live training every day in our virtual classroom with a Chinese teacher and an additional 3 hours face to face training over the weekend. So far I am impressed with the positive result of the online learning part. The key to learning Mandarin is correct pronunciation of the different tons which is the greatest challenge for a good distance training solution.  Using her webcam, my teacher allows me to follow her mouth at any moment, which I wouldn’t be able to do with her sitting next to me. Having a good headset and connection allows me to totally focus on her pronunciation, being alone in front of my computer to freely talk without repression. Receiving the vocabulary learned and the documents used after every lesson makes it extremely convenient for me to take 15min in the evening to review what I learned in the morning.

In the last month we twice skipped the face to face training and decided on online training even over the weekend. The fact that nobody has to move, that classes can be taken spontaneously in the evening in pyjamas and that all the materials including vocabulary are already online is very  appealing.

After two months of both online and offline Mandarin training I consider both ways to be equally efficient. Because of online training being so flexible in a lot of aspects, I consider it to be a better solution for busy people.

After Facebook and co have shown us that online socializing is possible and practiced worldwide, I do believe that social learning has a great future as well. The idea of getting to know people online by studying with them and exchanging experiences and information with them sounds very useful, promising and exciting to me.

In the upcoming month I am planning to invite some passionate Mandarin learners in Shanghai and Berlin to join me on eSpok to test and experience social learning.

We will soon be releasing a Russian language version of our platform, which means in addition to English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese, eSpok will be available in 6 languages.

Offering a website like ours in different languages, while simultaneously updating, maintaining and adding new features can often be problematic, but we believe this is absolutely necessary in order to be able to consistently fulfill the needs of our clients.

It was a long time before the popular networking service Facebook offered localized versions of its website. It is our intention here at eSpok to provide as many languages as possible thus allowing our clients to learn comfortably and conveniently in their own native languages.

If you require a specific language that is not yet available, you are quite welcome to contact us. Our translation team will do its very best to make it available for you as soon as possible.

As you may already know, eSpok uses the Leitner system for helping students to learn their vocabulary.

Espok Leitner Vocabulary System

In this system students review vocabulary words with an increase of allotted time in between each review upon successful demonstration of one’s ability to master a vocabulary word. Thus, if a student has demonstrated the word has been learned; review of this word will become less frequent. Until today, we proposed two modes of revision. In the first mode, the student is presented the original word in his language and he has to write down the word so that the computer can check if both words match. If the words match the word will automatically be moved to the next group to be reviewed later. The second mode leaves the student free to decide whether he knows or does not the word. Therefore, in the second mode the student is being asked to evaluate his or her knowledge.

The problem with the second mode is in actuality it doesn’t stimulate the written memory and furthermore the student can “cheat” rather it be intentionally or unintentionally. The reason why we introduced this mode was specifically for languages such as Chinese where the learners usually don’t know how to write the ideograms with their computer. Perhaps as well they may not be able yet to write in Pinyin (Chinese transcription into latin characters) as it uses special accents for the tones. Tones are extremely important in the Chinese language so it seemed to us very important that a student; when reviewing his or her vocabulary, should actually be able to check one’s knowledge of these tones.

It is our goal at eSpok of having a system which can be used to learn every language. We have therefore introduced a new reviewing mode for the flash card dedicated to Chinese language. In this mode, the student can write in many different ways the original word and the computer will recognize it. For example:

1. If the original word is written in ideogram like 你好 (Means “Hello” in Chinese)
The student can write all of the following combination:

• 你好 (the original word)
• nǐhǎo
• ni3 hao3 : the tones are represented by their numbers
• ni hao

2. If the original word is nǐhǎo, the possibilities are:

• nǐhǎo
• ni3 hao3
• ni hao