I just went to the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico for a week, and I fell in love not only with the clear aqua waters of the Caribbean but also with the language of its people. I came home resolved to learn Spanish, and planned to buy Rosetta Stone language learning software to get started.
Then, I remembered all the articles on MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) that I've been reading.
Coursera,
Udacity,
Khan Academy, and
edX are the major platforms of online courses. They are collaborations of major universities, venture capitalists, and developers looking to offer the world's best learning to everyone -- for free.
When I searched these sites, there wasn't a Spanish class on them, but further Google searching yielded two other options. The first is
Spanish MOOC, which is run by a language educator named Scott Rapp. It simulates a traditional class structure. Run over 12 weeks, it includes lectures, conversation, homework, and even tests. It uses digital tools like Google Hangout for interaction. Also like a traditional class, it has a start and end date, and I had missed my window to join.
So I kept searching, and I found
duoLingo.
Using duoLingo is easy. You create an account and walk through the short simple lessons, a combination of phrases, vocabulary and grammar. You read, write, and with your PC's microphone, practice pronunciation. The experience is lightly gamified for fun, and you have the option of repeating areas of the lesson where you need more practice.
Why would a website offer free language classes? It's a bit of a quid pro quo. It teaches you Spanish. You join its crowdsourced project to translate the Internet.
The project is the brainchild of Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Luis Von Ahn. According to the
Motley Fool, it's a well-funded brainchild with $18 million in backing from venture capital firms, as well as Ashton Kutcher, and Tim Ferris, the author of
The 4-Hour Work Week.
We'll see how much Spanish I'll learn in this manner, and whether I'll ever get good enough to contribute to the translation of tomes of content on the Internet. I'm a little skeptical on that part.
Either way, it's amazing that some learning has been freed from its gatekeepers and is providing competition to paid education. Rosetta Stone lost at least one customer for now. It's not enough to charge for learning just cause you can. I'll pay for Rosetta Stone if I end up needing it. But I'll need some proof of that first.
As Thomas Friedman recently reported, "Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of
'time served' to a model of 'stuff learned.'" If base education is free, then paid education will need to offer more than the promise of 12 weeks or four years to park ourselves in class. They'll need to show us it works.
