I would like to share with you some thoughts on how to make LingQ more friendly for Teachers and at the same time use Teachers to spread information about LingQ to their students and colleagues.
We all know that learning new technologies can be tough. And we all know that it’s difficult to get this habit of self-learning.
LingQ is a great tool to work with reading and listening skills and teachers could use it for homework after showing some context during the lesson. At the same time, LingQ lessons have a great option to add exercises to them. I tried to combine it with learningapps.org and it works brilliantly.
The only problem is that I can’t force my students to use LingQ as it’s not free. And I can’t force them to investigate by themselves how everything works as they are not yet in the “self-education” mode. It’s a challenging habit to build.
So my thought was to create so-called “Students” accounts that would be free and that would allow only to see lessons created by the teacher. But at the same time, there will be the ability to create as many LingQ as they want. Basically, all features are available except adding their personal lessons and see the lessons available for everyone.
That will allow:
to make LingQ more useful for teachers and tutors and gain their trust;
to introduce LingQ to a new group of people (students) through their teachers;
to use teachers and their guides in the LingQ world. They will support and educate students on how to work with the system and they will do that for free;
teachers to build this self-education habit in their students to prepare them for using LingQ independently;
to give “students” with free accounts motivation to upgrade their accounts to premium users, because they will get used to using the system, they will know how to use it and they will desire to use their own content eventually.
And because students will know how to use the system (they would be “raised” with this system), they will more likely be “long-term” users.
Thank you very much for your attention and time,
Alla
Nice idea! This is the way to get a new and big group of users and some organic promotion for free. Unlock linqs, lock lessons, give permits to hand out invitations to students.
We do have a Classroom feature available at LingQ and a lot of schools/teachers are actually using the feature at the moment. We do offer significant discounts for students via the Classroom feature.
For example, if you have passages from a textbook you’d like to add to the lingq for your students to review for homework, what is considered fair use?
This is my biggest worry about partnering with lingQ.
I think the tech available here could be insanely valuable for students, but as an organisation I can’t just steal content left and right like an individual user can for personal use. It’s unfair to the publishers of the content and it has potential legal ramifications.
This wouldn’t be a problem if I developed my own curriculum, but that isn’t feasible for most classrooms or classroom teachers. Of course we’re using textbooks from one of the major publishers. LingQ at some point might be able to partner with other organisations to legally provide such content, but I understand that it’s a licensing nightmare and that by focusing on students individually building out their lesson content you avoid a lot of potential headaches.
Hi TeacherMark,
I suppose, first of all, it depends on the country. It varies from country to country.
Also, if you have your content visible only for your students in the closed classroom, then it might be treated as sharing materials inside your class so I don’t see any issues. It’s the same if you send a file to your friend via Whatsapp or share it in Google Drive.
But I don’t know the law. I guess, if there are concerns, then it’s better to check with some copyright consultant to know for sure what is applicable. I am pretty sure there is a grey area and to make it white we need more actual cases and discussions between all parts involved.
But if LingQ wants to share some materials openly with the whole community, then it’s a completely different case and agreement with the owner is needed.
This is my point of view.
I believe that money comes to you if you serve people well, if you see your goal as an infinite, not achievable journey when you understand that there will always be areas for improvement and making your service better.
But if you have a short-term goal, then you can have some money first, but then you will see your sunset…
Of course, school size doesn’t matter. Any teacher interested can contact us on support(at)lingq.com and get more details about the LingQ for Classroom feature.
I’m hoping too! But I’m testing everything out now.
LingQ has been great for me as an English speaker. Every word that I click in Japanese has an immediate definition!
I tried to help set up an account for a Korean and Brazilian student. For the Korean student, when she clicked the english words it only gave her an English definition! Same for the Brazilian student using Portuguese.
I‘m praying it’s a tech issue on my part, but if not maybe there just aren’t enough students learning on LingQ the other way around?
Learning other languages using English is a great experience.
Learning English on LingQ using other language’s definitions might not have a large enough student base yet?
I can tell here only from Russian perspective. In 99.9% I do have some translations that were previously created by other students. But I understand that there might be much larger Russian-speaker community on LingQ than Korean or Brazilian. Maybe that is the case.
Though I don’t see an issue in not having the translation available from other studies for several reasons.
I think it’s useful to look at the explanation of English words in English. It’s a bit more complicated and you need to have some level of English already, but I find it a good practice.
I can see / connect different Russian-English dictionaries where I can search for particular word I need. I understand that it’s time consuming and brings us back to the old times without all of these automation possibilities, but again, it helps to find the particular meaning you need for your context, to think about words more carefully.
Do your students see dictionaries available for their languages?
I always recommend that my higher level students use an English → English dictionary anyway so they should be fine.
I’m spoiled by how many recommended definitions come up for me as an English native
It’s not the worst thing in the world for them to add their own definitions. I’m going to test out LingQ with some students starting in November to see if they enjoy using it or not
