That scale of operations provides Coursera with an interesting perspective on global skills development trends, many of which are reflected in the recently released .

Among its key findings, the report highlights the importance of micro-credentials for building and maintaining an agile workforce. “By 2030, an estimated 92 million jobs will be displaced, while 170 million new ones will be created—a net gain of 78 million roles,” says the report. “Eighty-five percent of employers say they need to upskill their workforce just to keep pace, and 70% plan to hire talent with new capabilities in areas like data science, cloud computing, and GenAI. This transformation means micro-credentials are more vital than ever for establishing skills and career readiness.”

Just over nine in ten employers (91%) say that employees with micro credentials demonstrate better command of core competencies. A similar proportion of employees (94%) with micro credentials say the qualifications have accelerated their career development and allowed them to be more competitive in a quickly changing labour market.

Coursera reports that those patterns are playing out within its own enrolment base with “positive growth” in Professional Certificate enrolments in all global regions, including a 37% increase in North America (the highest globally) and 36% growth in the Middle East and North Africa year-over-year.

The report highlights as well the surging demand in some quickly expanding and evolving fields of work, notably Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity.

The report says of the former: “In 2023, early adopters flocked to GenAI, with approximately one person per minute enrolling in a GenAI course on Coursera – a rate that rose to eight per minute in 2024. Since then, GenAI has continued to see exceptional growth, with global enrolment in GenAI courses surging 195% year-over-year—maintaining its position as one of the most rapidly growing skill domains on our platform. To date, Coursera has recorded over 8 million GenAI enrolments, with 12 learners per minute signing up for GenAI content in 2025 across our catalog of nearly 700 GenAI courses.”

Employer surveys over that same period highlight the competitive advantage for candidates with GenAI skills, with labour market demand for roles in AI technology expected to expand by another 40% within the next four years. “Mastering AI fundamentals – from prompt engineering to large
language model (LLM) applications – is essential to remaining competitive in today’s rapidly evolving economy,” concludes the report.

Following growing worldwide concerns around data security and data protection, a similar pattern is playing out across Coursera’s Cybersecurity catalogue. Year-over-year growth in Cybersecurity courses on the platform reached 106% in Latin America, 20% in Europe, and 14% in Asia Pacific in 2025. But the report nevertheless identifies a significant and widespread labour market gap in this area: “Globally, nearly five million additional cybersecurity professionals are needed, and
two-thirds of employers cite skill gaps as a barrier to adopting emerging technology. Security
Management Specialist ranks among the top five fastest-growing roles, yet less than half of organizations feel ‘highly prepared’ to defend against AI-driven cyber threats.”

Skills training alongside degrees

“Two-thirds of employers regard skill shortages as a major barrier to business growth,” notes the report, “and in countries like Germany, unfilled vacancies cost an estimated US$339 billion (1.3% of GDP).”

The vast majority of employers surveyed by Coursera say that they have adopted or are exploring skills-based hiring – an approach that focuses on skills qualifications in combination with traditional degrees.

Those broad patterns carry with them some important implications for international educators including the need to demonstrate career linkages and outcomes at every level of study, the opportunity to combine more traditional qualifications with alternate credentials (including micro credentials), and the potential of combining more conventional modes of delivery on campus with remote learning or transnational education in order to support graduates in continuing skills training.

For additional background, please see:

• “Are employers recognising alternative credentials in hiring decisions?“
• “New study highlights the expanding landscape of microcredentials“
• “The growing importance of non-degree credentials“

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The report was produced by ETS, the world’s largest private educational testing and measurement organisation, and it is entitled the . The authors consider that the development of successful societies hinges on three interrelated factors:

• Access to education
• Pursuit of upward mobility
• Engagement in upskilling/reskilling

ETS has pioneered a measurement system to create the “ETS Human Progress Index,” and this year’s survey serves as the baseline for the index to be updated annually. The aim is for the index to serve as “a gauge of global advancement and an opportunity to identify
gaps that demand increased attention.”

The surveyed countries were:

• Australia
• Brazil
• Canada
• China
• France
• Germany
• Kenya
• India
• Indonesia
• Japan
• Mexico
• Nigeria
• South Korea
• Vietnam
• UAE
• UK
• USA

Key findings

• 88% of global respondents said that to succeed in today’s hyper-competitive world, continuous learning is essential and tied to security and well-being.

• 86% agreed that “as time goes on, more jobs will require skills people don’t currently have.”

• Access to education is uneven across the world and “disparities in access are often rooted in socioeconomic status and government investment.” Interestingly, some of the countries in which citizens feel especially challenged in this sense are not the least developed, but often the most advanced (e.g., South Korea, France, Canada, UK, US).

• Respondents who are most pessimistic about the state of higher education in their country are from advanced economies, especially France (68% pessimistic) and South Korea (61% pessimistic).

• There is a sense that technology – and rapid advances in technology – lead to acquired skills quickly becoming obsolete, which underscores the importance of access to lifelong learning.

• More than three-quarters (78%) of respondents believe that being able to prove that a new skill has been mastered (e.g., by means of a certificate) will be as valuable as a degree by 2035.

• More than 7 in 10 respondents see a role for AI-generated guidance and assessments in the future.

Nuances of the findings

We can imagine that some responses are heavily informed by cultural context. For example, respondents in high-income countries were responding amid educational contexts that have been relatively advanced for years. Most of those respondents would not have experienced what it is like to live in a country with an objectively sub-par educational system. Such a bias might be reflected in the following chart from the report, where respondents in Brazil, Mexico, Kenya, and Nigeria occupy the top right-hand quadrant (“quality education is very important and difficult to access”) and respondents in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, UK, and US are in the bottom right-hand quadrant defined in part by a (questionable) sense that quality of education is less important.

Respondents in mid-income countries were also more likely to consider that quality education is mostly reserved for more privileged members of their society.

Affordability is a key challenge

The top three barriers that respondents cited in terms of accessing quality of education are “too expensive/lack of financial resources” (57%), “socio-economic background” (32%), and “lack of qualified teachers” (31%). The relative affordability of micro-credentials is thus a major competitive advantage for providers of them – and we can imagine that this this advantage would become even more compelling if micro-credentials were better recognised and valued in formal educational systems.

Financial insecurity and worries about the future rise in certain countries

The following screenshot shows how much worry is present among many families in developing economies about their children’s future well-being and about staying financially solvent.

Entrenched social classes are an issue for many families in economies characterised by large gaps between the rich and poor. This is mostly a characteristic of poorer countries, but it is also the case in the US, which is home to the highest number of billionaires in the world. In the US, the top 1% of earners take 15% of all wages earned in the country.

Indians, Vietnamese, and Kenyans were the most likely to agree that “My family has historically faced challenges in achieving socioeconomic and financial security.” In the US, agreement with this statement was much higher among people of colour (POCs) than white people (26% vs. 13%, respectively).

The terrible toll of systemic inequality

The most cited reasons for an inability to achieve upward mobility were “income inequality” (39%), lack of job opportunities (34%), and “systemic bias (28%).

The role of AI

Acceptance of AI is rising around the world despite concerns about its potential to replace the value of human intelligence/innovation and to be used by bad actors. The ETS survey results reveal that global respondents see a role for AI to play in how people learn and are assessed: 78% agreed that “AI can enhance learning assessments by tailoring them to individual needs” and 72% agreed that they “would trust AI-generated guidance for improving skills.” That said, 71% consider AI to have the potential to “negatively impact learning assessments due to unintentional biases and programming flaws.”

Insights from the experts

Spiked into the ETS report are insightful quotes from experts, employers, and analysts. These include:

• “The biggest mismatches are now on the quality and relevance of skills.” —Andreas Schleicher, Director for the Directorate of Education and Skills OECD

• “Learning how to learn is probably the key skill. The half-life of skills is getting shorter as more and more technology comes in. The most important ability is learning how to use the new tools in the way that is resonant with being a human and the job to be done.”—Eric Lavin, Partner, Avalanche VC

• “Higher education is very slow to react … I think there are two major forces that are putting pressure on higher education. One is technology, and second is the needs of the market.”—Shai Reshef, Founder and President, University of the People

• “In the past, the benchmark for everyone was the same, we were all measured against the same criteria. In the future, we will be able to develop a personalised assessment, based on individual abilities and aspirations, which would be a great step forward.”—Joana Lenkova, Futurist and Strategist, Futures Forward

Future currency

As for the conclusions that can be drawn from the findings of the global survey, the authors of the ETS 2024 Human Progress Report write:

“Continuous learning emerges as the currency of tomorrow. Those proficient at leveraging certifications, micro-credentials and AI will lead the charge, creating innovative paths to success. The resounding acknowledgment of “lifetime learners” as a global majority highlights an inseparable link between continuous learning and individual security.

Despite challenges in accessing education, achieving upward mobility and engaging in upskilling/reskilling, society recognizes the importance of these factors for human progress. The challenges, while formidable, are not insurmountable. They demand innovative solutions, assessments and credentialling to ensure a holistic and accessible educational journey.”

For additional background, please see:

• “New analysis estimates a five-year window for responding to AI impacts on higher education”

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So it was a somewhat noteworthy development when Ms Meeker published a new report last month: “.”

The paper is essentially a call for higher education, corporations, and government to work together to, on the one hand, transform higher education to take full advantage of new AI technologies. On the other hand, it is also a call for continued American leadership in the field of generative AI.

“Actions taken in the next five years will be consequential,” says Ms Meeker. “It’s important for higher education to take a leadership role, in combination with industry and government. The ramp in artificial intelligence – which leverages the history of learning for learning – affects all forms of learning, teaching, understanding, and decision making…In the wake of ChatGPT and the AI explosion, we have likely reached a generational, fast and furious change across education. At their essence, AI and connected technology devices provide multimodal personalised output that can help users quickly get information and develop skills on their own terms. Tools that provide real-time feedback on engagement and skill development will continue to improve, enhancing the evolution of pattern recognition.”

She is echoing a point made by many others throughout history, from Aristotle to Khan Academy founder Sal Khan and many in between, which is that students benefit the most from individualised learning and from the chance to learn at their own pace. At the same time, Ms Meeker sees a number of factors coming together to drive change in higher education, including the rising costs of post-secondary, an increasing focus on ROI and career outcomes, and a greater emphasis on core skills and adaptability alongside more specific job or technical skills.

“To maintain academic relevance and market share, many universities require a mindset change,” she adds. “The key for universities today, we believe, will be creating education-as-a-service and generating ROI for student-customers while building best-in-class programmes with differentiated teachers…Yesterday’s signaling credential may not make sense in a more meritocratic, skills-based world…[I]n each case, universities must determine their competitive advantages, create relevant best-in-class programmes and environments, and find ways to gain share in an increasingly competitive environment.”

This is a paper to pay attention to, given the author and her audience, which will include many of the larger institutional and venture investors in the technology space. Investment continues to pour into AI technologies, and we should expect that this will only further accelerate growth in digital teaching and learning, including with respect to transnational education or other remote delivery.

For additional background, please see:

• “���Ϲ��� Podcast: The impact of Artificial General Intelligence on international education“
• “ChatGPT for international education marketing: What is ‘Prompt Engineering?’“
• “AI is here…Are you ready?“

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This month’s episode features a panel of founders for three tech-driven startups in our sector: Kasper Baars from the digital student-university matchmaker The Discov; Lydia Jones from room-booking platform ; and Carla Wyburn with – each of whom has a fascinating behind-the-scences story to tell about their respective startup business.

We conclude with a closer look at Sweden as the latest stop for our “Keys to the Market” segment.

You can listen right now in the player below, and we encourage you to subscribe via your favourite podcast app in order to receive future episodes automatically.

For additional background, please see:

• “���Ϲ��� Podcast: The impact of Artificial General Intelligence on international education“

The post ���Ϲ��� Podcast: Start-ups in international education: disrupters or innovators? appeared first on ���Ϲ��� Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

“Digital Language Learning is accelerating rapidly, increasing access, reducing cost, and leveraging technology to drive higher levels of language proficiency at scale,” says HolonIQ. “Beyond tens of millions of new ‘mobile first’ language learners, digital is serving a much needed on-ramp and enabler for both online and offline tutoring.”

argues that the total language learning market is “materially under-estimated” due to the fragmented nature of offline provision in combination with strong recent-year growth in digital delivery. Using a combination of demand side and supply side inputs, the HolonIQ model projects a global language training market of US$115 billion by 2025, up from an estimated US$61 billion as of 2019. “We estimate the language learning market will almost double in size by 2025,” notes the analysis. “Mobile-first and online tutoring will accelerate and triple in size over the next five years.”

To underscore that point, the following charts illustrate that projected growth will be heavily influenced by the expansion of digital delivery, which is expected to account for more than 40% of industry revenues by 2025.

HolonIQ projects that students pursuing English language studies will in turn be the primary drivers of growth in both offline/blended and digital delivery, as reflected in the additional charts below.

“We have fundamentally upgraded our outlook,” says HolonIQ. “This may seem counter-intuitive given the widespread damage to offline and in-person providers COVID has driven, however we are optimistic on the mid to long-term economic recovery and remain convinced of the long-term demand for ‘blended’ in-person, campus-based and generally ‘face to face’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ English language learning. As hard as it is to imagine right now, under a positive recovery scenario, we see demand for offline language learning exceeding 2019 levels by 2024 and regaining ground rapidly, albeit having undergone a digital transformation to protect against another disruption.”

There are some intriguing aspects of this analysis, including that the broader market is notoriously difficult to measure (especially with respect to new and emerging digital offerings), and the persistent and growing role of digital delivery going forward.

Based on our historical understanding of the composition of the global language travel market, it is possible that the HolonIQ projections overstate the proportion of English language learning within the total market. But the trends we often observe in this respect reflect only those students that travel for language study, and we can acknowledge that that represents only a fraction (i.e., less than 1%) of all language learners worldwide.

HolonIQ estimates the total population of language learners worldwide at roughly 1.8 billion, of which slightly more than 1.4 billion seek to learn English for work, study, or pleasure.

For additional background, please see:

• “The world’s changing language landscape“
• “Study reveals shifting motivations for language travel and changes in how students book courses“
• “New report maps student expectations for language study“
• “2.28 million abroad for language study in 2014“

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These new platforms are designed to solve a number of issues that teachers, parents, and students have encountered during COVID, including:

• Huge class sizes in which students often don’t feel comfortable, or even capable, of asking questions or interacting with their peers;
• Engagement problems – such as students becoming bored, distracted, or frustrated – that instructors either can’t see or can’t really address;
• Teaching done mainly through virtual presentations or lectures with little room for class participation or group work – a format that can be boring and one-dimensional for students sitting at home without the energy that comes from being in a physical classroom;
• Instructors feeling overwhelmed trying to connect with students through technology that isn’t built for teaching and learning.

A simple solution

is building teaching tools on top of the now well-established Zoom platform. It is designed for K-12 as well as higher education providers, and with simplicity in mind in order to maximise uptake among schools and teachers. This uptake is further assured because so many schools are already using Zoom; there’s a familiarity built into the concept. Features include new tools for:

• Taking attendance;
• Monitoring participation;
• Facilitating group discussion;
• Organising students by a seating chart;
• Handing out assignments;
• Giving a quiz;
• Enabling teachers to chat one-on-one with a student without interrupting other students.

All these capabilities happen within Zoom platform, so teachers don’t have to worry about integrating multiple technologies as they teach. The starting price is US$10,000 a year per school with prices scaling depending on the number of students in classes.

Class was founded by Michael Chasen, former CEO of and is operating on a US$46 million venture round raised through a dream team of investors including Bill Tai (an early investor in Zoom) as well as Emergence Capital, GSV Ventures, Owl Ventures, and Reach Capital. Class expects to have 200 employees by the end of 2021.

Facilitating group work

, a videoconferencing platform for higher education, was created in California by the co-founder of Coursera (recently valued at US$2.5 billion), Daphne Koller, as well as her husband Dan Avida, Jamie Nacht Farrell, and Serge Plotkin. The idea for the startup came from Ms Koller and Mr Avida watching their teenage daughters learning on Zoom last year. Ms Koller told that, “We caught one of them in the middle of class playing Sims, and the other one watching a Netflix video … we started talking about how great the need was for something other than Zoom.”

The startup has raised at least US$14.5 million, and it stands out especially because it addresses the major problems of large class sizes and limited group interaction. There is more of a learning curve for teachers compared to platforms like Zoom, but the founders say the greater complexity is worth it because of what Engageli allows professors and students to do.

Engageli uses a “table” metaphor that allows professors to break students into small groups of 10 or fewer students who then work together on projects. Professors can come in and sit at the table to help out and keep everyone on track, and they’re more able to see how students are doing because they’re looking at a small group of students’ faces – not an entire classroom.

There’s also a neat study aid integrated into Engageli. Within the platform, students can screenshot slides and write notes on them, and these slides are hyperlinked so students can go back to the live recording associated with their note.

Engageli includes some of the same engagement features as Class such as the ability to give quizzes and polls and to see how students are participating individually and in groups. It is also built with the way students really interact with each other in mind – for example, it allows students to text each other or the entire class as they work, and students can also send the professor emojis to quickly communicate if they are having trouble understanding something or needing help.

Not trying to replicate the in-class environment

has raised US$130 million so far and is based on delivering content through pre-recorded video. CEO Mike Silagadze says that Top Hat experimented with a virtual classroom concept initially, but “very quickly learned that it was fundamentally just the wrong strategy.”

Top Hat embraces asynchronous content delivery and is particularly interesting for international learners across time zones: Mr Silagadze believes that “nobody wants to stare at a screen and then have the restraint of having to show up at a previous pre-prescribed time.” He thinks that after COVID, universities are going to embrace the hybrid model: they’ll invest heavily in the instruction and experience students can get in person and use online tools to supplement face-to-face learning.

Top Hat digitises textbooks – but in an interactive way, with polls and interactive graphics embedded in the text. The company also launched a complementary product last year called Community, which is a virtual meeting space for teachers and students to connect and discuss assignments; it has private channels as well for one-one-one conversations.

By teachers, for teachers

was created in the US “by teachers, for teachers” by Dr Narine Hall, a Data Science and Machine Learning professor at Champlain College. Ms Hall says, “In the spring, when I was trying to do teamwork in the classroom, it was nearly impossible. So I decided to sit down and code a solution myself.”

InSpace (now a private company) allows students and professors to move around their virtual classroom, zoom in and out, and adjust audio settings. Instead of being fixed in a “Brady Bunch” box like in Zoom, students and professors are represented in a little circle with their photo in it and they can click and drag this circle around the classroom to participate in labs or discussions. When they move closer to someone or a group, they hear that person or group more clearly as if they were really sitting beside them, and when they move away, that conversation fades away so they can find new groups with which to interact. InSpace also allows for breakout rooms.

Dr Wibesa Wollega, an assistant professor at Colorado State University Pueblo, says he likes InSpace because its features “are designed to represent the coziness of a classroom environment especially with the ease of moving around the classroom.”

Ms Hall told ,

“You can freely move around and feel the space. You get social cues through movement of video circles, like when I come close to someone, they know I want to talk to them. It’s a socially sensitive platform.”

For additional background, please see:

• “Demand for online learning and alternative credentials surges during COVID-19”
• “���Ϲ��� Exchange podcast: What is the outlook for online learning in higher education?”

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Have you ever tried virtual reality? You know, where you slip on a headset and enter a 3D world to interact with situations, settings, and other participants?

VR has graduated from its gaming roots and is now finding a wide range of applications across a number of industries. Some of the most impressive examples have been in training, where VR has been shown to boost learner confidence and speed knowledge acquisition.

And so perhaps it is not surprising that VR has now come to language learning as well. is a unique virtual reality software platform for synchronous teaching and learning in the ELT sector. It is, as Chief Revenue Officer Christian Rowe puts it, “A new medium for language education.”

VR is also arguably a true hybrid of in-person and online learning, in that it allows students and teachers to interact with each other in a digital space. In either a traditional classroom setting or an online class, students might be asked to imagine themselves in a coffee shop or to pretend they are competing in a debate. But in a VR environment, they can actually interact in a cafe – albeit a digital one – or they can actually participate in a debate in a fully immersive 3D debate chamber. And they can have that experience regardless of how their class is delivered otherwise.

In that sense, VR can blend into any language class whenever the focus shifts to practice and language production. “The life of an ELT instructor has become extremely difficult,” says Head of Efficacy & Learning Sara Davila. “Teachers are moving from in-person classes to online, or even leading hybrid classes with some students on-site and some following remotely. Our job is to help them more easily do their job by providing meaningful practice opportunities for students, and by creating space for teachers to better observe and assess their students.”

VR immerses students in realistic settings where they are interacting with other participants, just as they would in real life. It has proven to be a powerful tool for boosting motivation for adult learners and engagement for younger students. And that emphasis on developing fluency and confidence is a critical factor in student progression. “Right now, too much time is spent on [teacher] presentation, and too little time on communicative group and pair work because of the challenges and limitations with conventional online video meeting apps,” adds Ms Davila.

Immerse is putting additional options in the hands of teachers this year with its newly launched Planning Hub, a lesson plan editor that allows teachers to customise text and interactive objects in the VR space with the click of a button on their desktop computer. “Our goal is to empower teachers, instructional designers, and non-technical people to easily create within this new medium for education,” said Jacob Furnari, Chief Product Officer. “The Planning Hub feature enables educators to bring their curriculum to life in VR for their students.”    

All of this is happening as some of the hurdles that have slowed the mainstream adoption of VR are falling away. New (and much more affordable) headsets, notably the Oculus Quest 2 (US$299), have been purchased by millions of people around the world in just a short span of a few months since its release, and Immerse supports its client-schools with highly effective training workshops that can get new teachers and curriculum designers up and running on the desktop application in just a few hours. “We’re not taking a general-purpose tech tool and trying to use it for language learning,” adds Mr Rowe. “This is a platform made for teachers by teachers.”

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Language travel remains a dynamic and growing market. Nearly 2.3 million students went abroad for language study in 2014, and many of these students did so as a foundation for further study overseas.

At the same time, many traditional sending markets are investing heavily in language teaching within their domestic education systems, meaning that additional students have an opportunity to develop greater proficiency without (or at least prior to) going abroad. Moreover, growing numbers of students are using online resources for language study, everything from free YouTube tutorials to MOOCs to paid online services offered by industry stalwarts such as Rosetta Stone. These trends are spurring the proliferation of language apps and leading some traditional language schools to enhance their offerings using online technologies.

Language schools are tapping into tech-enabled language learning in a variety of ways. Some schools offer online courses for inbound students or follow-up training for alumni. Others provide standalone courses online that may or may not be directly linked to face-to-face programmes abroad. And still others are finding entirely new business models built around technology-enabled language teaching.

These new models and experiments create a dynamic between traditional and emerging forms of delivering language learning that will play an important role in shaping demand for study abroad in the years ahead.

It’s in your pocket

With a reported 150 million users and an active user base of 30 million students per month, the language learning app  is the most downloaded education app for both Apple and Android devices. While education apps represent only about 5% of global iOS downloads, the category is a lively one, with year-over-year growth of 13% through the second quarter of 2016.

Even against that backdrop, the adoption rate for Duolingo is particularly impressive. Launched in 2012, the company has raised more than US$80 million in venture financing to date and claims not to have spent any of it on marketing. Rather, the company attributes its phenomenal growth curve to a highly engaging, gamified approach – all underpinned by clever machine learning technology – and to the tremendous word-of-mouth promotion the app has received.

Students can use Duolingo to study multiple languages, with the options varying according to the user’s native language. Most students on the service are using it to learn English, but English speakers can use it to study Spanish, French, and 14 additional European languages.

The industry-tracking service App Annie reports that the number of Duolingo users in markets such as Brazil and Ukraine is roughly equivalent to the population of students enrolled in high school or university foreign-language courses in each country.

App Annie’s vice-president of marketing communications, Fabien Pierre-Nicolas, said in a recent interview with  that “In some countries … we’re seeing that around 5% of the total smartphone population is using Duolingo. For the sake of comparison, about 10% of smartphone users in the US are playing Pokémon Go right now, and everyone is talking about it.”

School is still in

Although a service like Duolingo comes from the tech industry, there are many examples of interesting technology-enabled options being introduced by institutions or schools.

The UK-based online provider , for example, offers a fully online English for Academic Studies programme developed in collaboration with 25 higher education institutions in Australia, the UK, and seven other countries.

In Peru, the  has spun out an entirely separate sister school on the web. El Sol focuses mainly on teaching Spanish to international students who come to Peru for an immersion experience. But the online school –  – has developed into a distinct business over the past 10 years with its own brand, curriculum, teaching staff, and clientele. “It’s a different kind of instruction and we teach people differently than we do in the classroom,” says owner Alan La Rue. “Even so, I thought initially it would be the same client base, but in practice it hasn’t worked out that way. In fact, we’re attracting an older clientele [online] who live mostly in the United States.”

Perhaps one of the more innovative uses of technology by an established language school is from Vancouver-based Canadian College of English Language. Educators there began working on some initial computer-based course material in 2011, leading to a three-month pilot of CCEL’s first “paperless classroom.” The trial proved so popular that it expanded to a more wholesale adoption of technology-based learning throughout the school. It also led, in 2012, to the development of a standalone language curriculum and learning system called  that’s now being licensed to partner institutions in Mexico, Brazil, China, and Saudi Arabia.

Nearly 90,000 students now use Smrt English across 170 institutions, and the service has taken shape as a blended learning platform that allows students to combine in-class instruction with independent study outside of school hours. The combination has proven to be extremely popular and also highly effective: on average, Smrt English students progress through the English curriculum about 25% faster than those who pursue in-class studies alone. “Many students have prior experience with language learning and technology via apps or other online services,” says Smrt CMO Zach Taylor in explaining the appeal for students. “And fundamentally, students are heavily engaged with technology anyway.”

Building on that affinity for all things tech, the service is now poised for more international expansion. “We don’t want to change how teachers teach,” says Mr Taylor. “But we want to change the culture around English learning by engaging students and teachers in a much more effective way and at a much earlier age. Students should not be at a beginner level [of English] in high school or university. They should be ready for much bigger things.”

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