Virtual Language School. Distance learning made easy.
Potential students contact the Virtual Language School and a face-to-face interview is arranged and conducted via iChat or Skype. “It’s a needs-analysis interview”, explains Shalom. “We try to establish what level you’re at and what your goals are. We then try and find a teacher that can take that course”. The School puts the teacher and student in touch with each other and they arrange face-to-face classes.
Once the relationship has been established between teacher and student, administration falls to the Virtual Language School. This could present difficulties when you consider the outfit’s 32 employees and teachers are based all over the world but, thanks to Apple technology, the process has proved remarkably straightforward. Shalom and Stears communicate with staff using Mail, iChat and Skype. Stears says, “We also use IMAP email, which allows us to organise our correspondence into folders that can be accessed by everyone and ensures we are always in sync. We all use iPhones and can access our mail at any time from anywhere”.
In fact, when travelling, Shalom and Stears tend to make greater use of their iPhones than of their notebooks. Shalom says, “When we’re on trips, we rarely take our notebooks with us, but rather rely solely on our iPhones. We can communicate with our team and clients, access our documents, log on to banking services and social networks – all from a mobile device. We love the freedom that brings us”.
The School continues to make podcasts, such as ‘English TO GO’, which is available for free from the iTunes store. Shalom says, “We record audio in Soundtrack Pro and now edit video in Final Cut Pro. We then add chapter markers before encoding the finished article in QuickTime Pro. Next we load the videos onto our iPods and iPhones to check that everything is as it should be and that it works on the various different platforms, before FTPing final versions onto our server”. He adds, “All the apps work together very well, which gives us the sense that we’ve got everything covered”.
The podcasts are created in both full HD and iPhone versions. “Producing a variety of feeds is very easy to do”, explains Shalom. “Really, once the editing is done, we simply run an AppleScript to export to the various different files, then we leave it alone and go and do something else, and when we come back, it’s ready to be uploaded onto the server”.
Apple technology also provides an important backup facility for the School. Shalom says, “Our individual machines and our Time Capsule are backed up onto external hard drives using Time Machine and SuperDuper. These backups are set to run automatically, meaning they are always up to date. This gives us peace of mind that our data is safe with next to no effort from us”.
The Virtual Language School is now teaching approximately 20 different languages and brining students and teachers together from all over the world – one instructor in China is teaching Mandarin to a student in Venezuela. Overall, Shalom and Stears agree, the beauty of the Apple technology has been the way in which it has supported their venture at every step of the process – from the original idea to creating course materials to promotion and facilitating the actual language learning. Shalom says, “At every stage, we have felt inspired by the tools at our disposal, and we still do. Our business is going from strength to strength, and Apple technology has been with us since the beginning, encouraging and supporting us in trying different things”.
