New lessons in podcasting

Anyone who thinks a whiteboard, an overhead projector and an audio book featuring 1960s style characters is the height of technology when it comes to language teaching better think again.

OnDemand Training (ODT), an Irish company based in Shanghai, is revolutionising language learning using podcasting, which allows you to download audio and video files from the internet and listen to them on your PC or iPod.

ODT's founder, Dubliner Ken Carroll, launched Chinesepod.com in September, a Mandarin Chinese language-learning portal that allows users to download audio lessons as podcasts. Since November, the portal has been in the top five of the world podcast rankings at Yahoo.com boasting a total of 1.2 million downloads. The website gets 12,000-14,000 visits every day.

"This technology has opened up an entirely new world to us. We're discovering new depths every day. This will change language education and an Irish group is leading the way in the field," Carroll says.

People download the Chinesepod.com podcast for free. The plan is not to earn revenues using advertising - instead, interested students pay a monthly subscription of $5 (€4.18) for premium content which includes exercises and other material. The students can read accompanying texts in PDF format, leave feedback via e-mail, use Skype for calls, and discuss language-learning issues with other users of blogs.

"In recent years, the focus of technology in language education has been on using software to eliminate teachers as much as possible. Our approach is to select a small group of the very best teachers and deliver their lessons via podcasting to an unlimited number of learners," he says.

"We promote the lessons on the iTunes directory. People like it; they follow it up and come to the website.

"With language learning, you can listen and listen and listen but you need to do exercises. Only a small percentage of people who use the podcast actually pay, but that's fine. The podcast is your marketing," he says.

Carroll, from Templeogue, is a local celebrity in Shanghai, known for his appearances, in English and Chinese, on radio and television in China's financial hub.

He founded what he reckons was the first Sino-Irish joint venture when he started out in China 12 years ago setting up language schools.

These days, he's betting on podcasting to turn the industry on its head. Although his language school business was, and is, doing well, he started to look around at ways to develop the business because the economics of the language training industry are not particularly attractive - high rent, advertising, marketing and staff overheads.

"It's also an inefficient market, as you can use the schools only part of the time and the teachers are not busy all day.

"It tends to be a low-margin industry and quality control is poor. So we are looking at the internet for ways to improve distribution," says Carroll.

What he found were interactive web-based language teaching applications such as Englishtown and GlobalEnglish.

While these were an early solution to the distribution problem, they lacked sufficient guidance and simply weren't interactive enough.

He wanted to use the technology to enable communication, not to take the teacher out of the equation.

The emerging trend of Web 2.0 allows users to generate their own content through blogs, podcasting, file-sharing and photo-sharing using products like Flickr, Wikipedia and instant messaging. Podcasting makes language teaching more efficient as there is one teacher for a large audience and quality control is easy. It's also a lot more personal than audiobooks, for example, as there is still a teacher leading the class.

Looking ahead, the plan is to use Chinesepod as a precursor to other markets, as Chinese remains a niche language. Spanishpod.com is on the cards and they are also looking at using the portal for corporate training. But the "900lb gorilla" is English.

"We've had Englishpod.com since November and that's building a lot of traction.

"We've just launched a global feed for advanced English and a Japanese version of Chinesepod.com. There's a huge market there," he says. The idea will inevitably attract competitors.

"The big boys will see it and will want in, but they won't want to attack their traditional markets. This is still very experimental. We've come across potential competitors who are dismissive of it and we're delighted. Whatever threats we see will come from smaller start-ups who want to get in," he says.

The number of podcasters in China is forecast to reach 50 million by 2010, from between 500,000 and a million now.

With this in mind, ODT has also established Englishpod.com for Chinese learners of English but China is not a major focus yet for a number of reasons - there is a lack of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) usage and there is no real online payment system, as well as an absence of the iTunes and Apple culture to drive podcasting forward.

Carroll doesn't see this changing for the next three years, although in year four or five, China should take off because of the sheer size of the market. And if it happens earlier, the company will already be in the market.

Chinesepod.com's staff is made up of Irish, British, Canadians and Chinese teachers and techies, who can cover both the academic side and the coding side. An added advantage is that costs in China are around 15 per cent of what they would be in the West.

"It can take four years to produce a book and costs are high. With podcasts the cost of production is low, and it's a user-generated programme. This could devastate the traditional language schools if they fail to adopt the new technology," says Carroll.