Pearson: EnglishCafé
EnglishCafe was started in 2007 under GlobalEnglish prior to Pearson’s acquisition. We adopted the concept of social media to use for language education. Our goal was to build a community and an economy of English teachers and learners worldwide. EnglishCafé’s success led to an expansion of the B2B GlobalEnglish product suite.
My Role
As Lead UX Designer I designed the User Experience of EnglishCafé. With a small agile development team, we built EnglishCafé from scratch and quickly grew the community to over 250,000 registered users. We eventually merged EnglishCafé to the GlobalEnglish B2B curriculum and was sold as a suite to companies like Nikkei, Cisco, Deloitte, CSC and more.
Lesson Builder for Teachers and EC Player for Students
This was a step-by-step user interface for teachers that enable them to build an online interactive lesson. Each teacher can build an entire curriculum by grouping multiple lessons. Eventually teachers can choose to charge for their lessons, or charge for 1:1 live English class.
Each teacher had a library that contained their videos, images, audio files and custom-made quizzes.
The student view of a Lesson.
Lessons were a series of curated library items that focused on a learning objective.
Assessments and quizzes came in a variety of options.
Teacher Skype Sessions and Writing Annotation Toolbox
As the site matured, more and more students demanded more time with their teachers. At this point, we introduced teacher sessions which allowed teachers to hold audio/ video conference classes and charge for them. Teachers were also able to annotate students' blogs to help them write in proper English. I was the main designer and patent co-owner of this popular feature.
Teacher's view - upcoming session count-down with a link that launches Skype automatically adding student in the video conference.
Patent co-owner: (US 20110113320) Network-Accessible Collaborative Annotation Tool
GlobalEnglish One Vocabulary App
The mobile vocabulary app allowed a user to create word lists from their mobile app and through a browser plug-in. By simply selecting text within a browser, the user can quickly get translation, definition, and pronunciation of the word. They can also add the word to their list for future reference.
