LanguageBird
Interview with Dr. Karyn Koven, Founder of Language Bird
Well, I want to start by asking you about LanguageBird. What is it and how did you get started?
OK. Well, LanguageBird is online, live, one-to-one foreign language courses and lessons with native speakers via video chat. So, it’s the most personalized way to learn a language. You get a little bit of a cultural experience and you create a relationship with the native speaker who teaches you their language and culture.
You asked how it got started and really, it originated from my experiences as a school administrator. My goal was to get all of my students into college. In order to get into colleges, the best ones, you need to take your foreign language requirement and take it as far as you possibly can as a high school student. So that would be 4 full years of foreign language.
In lots of schools, including my own at that time, you weren’t able to take multiple levels of a language because of budgets, space, size of the school, or perhaps there weren’t languages available that you want to take. Maybe you only have the choice of Spanish or just Spanish and French.
So, some of my students started taking online classes in order to have a variety of languages to choose from but also more flexibility in their time, and to be able to take higher levels and make more room in their schedule by taking the foreign language course outside of the school day.
And what I noticed was, in a lot of programs online; students were not as engaged and even very good students with good intentions that were excited to learn another language, they weren’t engaged in the class because there was nobody to speak to.
So, it was all software and I wanted to create something that was about people connecting. It was about making connections about having that cultural experience that I explained, a more of a worldview, and a real connection with somebody who spoke the language so that they could see the value of being bilingual.
So, that’s where LanguageBird originated from. It was “What if I could connect people all over the world, teachers, find the best teachers that weren’t concerned about how they could get to my school, that could pick their schedules, that could decide when they wanted to work, and also that they wanted to work with high school students with the population that they wanted to work with? What if they could connect via video chat and have a relationship that way and learn from each other?” That’s the way that it started.
That’s great! One of the things that you touched on was, seeing that this was a need in the school that you were working at, can you talk a little bit more about that school?
Yeah, sure! I co-founded High Tech Los Angeles, which is a California Distinguished School; it’s a Blue Ribbon school, one of the top charter schools in California. As I mentioned, one of my primary goals there was to make sure that all of our students had the opportunity to go to a 4-year college. And so as a part of that and a part of our model, we were focused on subjects other than foreign language because we were really a technology-based school. What that meant was we had a college prep curriculum that focused on math, sciences, robotics, digital arts.
So the emphasis wasn’t as much on foreign language. Not to mention the fact that where it’s situated, most of the population of our students were already bilingual. So they already spoke Spanish at home, or Korean at home, Armenian, Russian, whatever, what have you. So, we didn’t focus as much on language and what we offered was Spanish, and we offered 2 levels of Spanish and then alternated the 3rd year, because of our space, the actual physical space of the school, our size which is only about 400 students. Smaller schools can’t afford to offer so many different options or have different teachers just hanging around or teaching just 5 or 6 kids that want to learn French.
And I find a lot of schools are like that whether they be in rural areas or smaller specialty private schools. So there’s a lot of reasons why schools today may focus on one thing but not as much on the other, whether it be budgetary, space, facility-wise, and a number of reasons. So that’s what the school is like. It’s not like we didn’t value it, it’s just you have to make certain choices when you’re a school leader as to what you’re going to emphasize. We just couldn’t fit the language in there as well as all the other things that we had.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what it was like to found a school and then we’ll circle back to LanguageBird, if that’s OK with you?
Yeah, of course. What was it like to found a school? Well, as a co-founder, I have to say at that time as a very young, new educator, I had only been teaching for about 4 years. I had gotten a certificate in College Counseling at UCLA. I knew that I really wanted to work with high school students but I didn’t know exactly to what capacity, or if I wanted to continue teaching and doing things like the newspaper and the yearbook, and all those kinds of activities of the school.
Then, sort of the opportunity came up. There’s a woman named Roberta Weintraub who has since become a big mentor of mine, a very close friend like a mother/grandmother figure to me now that we’ve known each other for almost 20 years. She is a school starter and so we really took her lead and she picked the location, she picked the first few members. Roberta picked 3 of us to go in with her and start this new school and it was really fun!
It was a great experience and it was exactly what I wanted because what I was missing or trying to figure out about my work in teaching at a big comprehensive high school was I was really missing a collaboration between teachers and between integrating different subjects. I was looking for things like sharing information about students and teaching in general. As a teacher that had under 5 years of experience, looking for mentors and the like, I was looking for a community to build but I also had, I felt a lot of ideas and a lot of things that I wanted to try and a charter school is a great place to do that.
It’s become known and this was 20 years ago but charter schools are really known for innovation and trying new things. And that was really interesting and very exciting to me, to sort of learn as you went and try things, have kids try things, see how resilient they are, and also how they can contribute to forming their school. It was really neat.
For example, the 1st year that we opened the school, I think that we changed our bell schedule 3 or 4 different times that was within the first few weeks. Some schools talk about it for years and never change it. We just thought this isn’t right for us, this isn’t working! Let’s try this or that, and what we found was that the more open we were with the kids about it like “Hey, we’re trying new things and today instead, you’re going to go to this class” and they were like “OK, we can do that”!
So they understood that they were also part of a little bit of an experiment but the good thing about that is that we never kept anything that didn’t work. When you have systems for a long time that are just in place, sometimes things get stagnant and people get afraid of change.
What I learned, I think, most from that environment and from being a startup school and the charter world is that collaboration is key. Learning from others including going to visit other schools and learning about what other schools were doing successfully is key. Working together collaboratively, students, teachers, parents, and experimenting, trying something and not being afraid to fail at it. Those are all very entrepreneurial kind of traits. It’s kind of unique to see that sort of, I guess, energy and public schools really they are modeled based on a model from long ago and many schools just never changed.
That was really refreshing to me to be able to change things as we wanted and as we grew, too because we grew to be over 25 faculty members, teachers, our mission and who we were and that collaboration really drove who we hired and who stayed around because they had to be in it too. They had to buy into our mission and our vision. So we really created like a family.
That’s great. A lot of what you were saying reminds me of the kind of personality, the skills and the flexibility that is required when you’re launching something new. How did you know that it was the right time to move on to LanguageBird and I’m not sure if you have moved on completely from High Tech High but how did you know you were ready for that transition and then how did some of those experiences from founding a school translate into this new venture you’re starting?
That’s a really good question. I have moved on except for the fact that like I just said we’re like family. So this past week, I had dinner with my other 2 co-founders, tomorrow I’m having breakfast with Roberta so we’re all super connected. We always will be because the experience that we had in building that school was, honestly, just a really special experience together.
I think that I knew personally that it was - and it’s always a personal thing - that it was time to look for the next thing when I just felt like we had created something that was going on its own, that things and systems that we had created were working really well. Initially, in the first few years, I had certain visions of things that I wanted to do like improving and creating an internship program. I wanted to learn more about college counseling and I got to do that for many, many years. I went through Graduate School while I was there so, at every step of the way I always felt challenged.
And then I think there was a certain point where, it wasn’t that I was bored in my work every day, it was just I was looking forward to and I really miss the days where everyday there was something new, a new challenge, a problem to fix. And while we still had a little bit of that, it didn’t feel as urgent and as exciting. It sounds funny because it’s like I wanted to create more problems for myself, which I definitely have done in some respects, but it’s about challenges and it’s about learning, right?
So for me, what drives me is about learning different things and I’m a lifelong learner and I feel like what was exciting to me about my idea to have an online school for foreign language was that there were a lot of things that I didn’t know about at all. How to do it technologically, how to format, and I really feel like online learning is the next frontier. It’s actually here already, very much so.
I think in the K-12 space, it’s just sort of really emerging and there’s a lot of things to figure out about it but I feel like the future, it’s where all the new stuff is going to be. And so that’s where I want to be, where the new stuff is, and solving problems, creating new problems, creating something for kids, parents, and now we work with adults, college students, or adults who want to learn a foreign language too. Helping people solve the problem of “How do I get this done in a limited amount of time with a busy schedule?” that’s not impersonal, and how technology now is becoming more personal. So I think that answers probably your question, I don’t know if I missed something but that’s sort of what drew me to leave and what excites me about going forward.
How do you match students to teachers?
Yeah, good question. We have teachers; they are located all over the world. First and foremost, students, high school students especially, have very scheduled time, right? They’re usually in school from 8 until 4 and they have a sport that they do, drama, or something like that. So, they usually have very limited time unless they’re home-schooled or there’s some other special situation or perhaps over the summer.
So what we have to do is, we have to first cater to their schedule and figure out when do they want to take their lessons. Then, I have to find teachers or a teacher of ours that is available during that time. So we’ll have to first search for our bank of teachers that is available for that language, that time. Then usually, either in our enrollment sheet or on a conversation that I have with parents before the student enrolls, we take a little bit of information about the students, about their level or their comfort with the language, if they’re a beginner or if they have particular interests, what their hobbies are, things like that and I try to match them up with a teacher that I think might be somebody that they have things in common with. It usually works!
I haven’t had any students switch teachers but I have some students who have just really, really exceptional, very close relationships with their teachers because they always meet with the same teacher every time online so they build a rapport with them. But yeah, we do the best that we can to try to match them up according to schedule and interest.
Got it. Typically, how long are these classes? Is it mapped on to a similar schedule as they would be taking in their regular school or is it accelerated? Longer? What does that look like?
In terms of during the day, or times during the day, some students take it within their daily schedule. We can work around that so if a school, for instance, has period 3 where the student can go into a lab and meet with one of our teachers, we can work with that. A lot of students just do it from home at night, on the weekends, early mornings.
In terms of schedule like a semester, or a yearlong schedule, our lessons - because they’re one-to-one - they’re expedited, they’re accelerated. You learn best really of anything - don’t know if you’ve ever had a dance class, or a trainer, or any other type of training - but when you’re working with somebody, you want one that’s most personalized and fastest way to learn. So, our program is accelerated.
Or tutoring, many people are aware of tutoring, right? You’re in a classroom setting, that’s a good example. You’re in a classroom setting, and even with the best teacher, sometimes you need more help with math, or you need somebody to sit down with you and explain it in a different way and one-to-one is the best way to quickly learn that.
So, our courses are 24 1-hour lessons to get credit for a full year of high school foreign language. It’s quite fast; students have to really be on when they’re with their teacher. It’s mostly focused on the spoken language and speaking and practicing, speaking and listening when they’re with their teacher.
On their own, they have homework to do so an hour or so of homework to do on their own which would be set from their online textbook or practicing the grammar that they learned with their instructor or doing some writing on their own but when they’re meeting with their teacher, it’s primarily speaking.
Yes, most of our students, in the case that they would take 2 lessons a week and then have a few hours of studying in between - in that case, they would take about a traditional school semester to finish a full year. So if they were taking 2 lessons a week, they’d finish a full year in 12 weeks. So that’s how the timing kind of works. Does that answer your question because I think that’s what you asked?
Yes. How long has this program been in place at this point?
I started it back in 2015 so it’s been just over 3 years now. Last year in 2017, we were accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC).
Congratulations!
And the courses are also.. Thanks! It’s actually kind of a neat process because when you go through accreditation, it’s really in order to, you’re talking before about startups, and it’s really like a business plan for schools. It’s kind of neat that they make you sit down and sort of outline and all this but also a plan for how you’re going to grow in the future. That part was most valuable to me to think about what’s coming next and to set some goals that other people will hold me accountable for. So that’s what accreditation essentially is.
We have our WASC accreditation and right now, we’re getting our Advanced Ed accreditation. As I mentioned, all of our courses are NCAA approved, which was really important to me because I’m an athlete. I know that there are a lot of athletes out there, student athletes that have very busy schedules and need to take some of their courses in their regular school day outside of a school day. Or they travel for competitions and such, and foreign language is not something that you can just read.
So history - if you’re studying it online and there’s great videos, there’s all kinds of things you can read, there’s many, many resources, lectures online you can listen to. You can really delve into a subject like that but when you’re talking about language, if you’re a student who travels a bit because you’re a competitive skier or tennis player or ice skater, whatever it might be, you really need somebody to be able to talk to you, communicate with you and teach you even when you’re in Sarajevo or Japan or South America.
We like to work with athletes; we work also with kids that are in the entertainment business, dance, performance, etc. It’s fun to get to know these kids, know their stories and to hear all kinds of profiles of what kind of students are out there, that’s just really neat.
That’s great! It’s great that this opportunity is available to them. I work with students and I think most of them are not very happy with their language experience in school but they all know they have to take it and it’s always a challenge to make it more fun and enjoyable for them. So I think that you’re doing something great for students that need a different type of way of learning that’s still personalized and accommodates their schedule and their interests.
Yeah, that’s the goal. You totally get it.
Has anything surprised you since you’ve been on this journey for, now almost 3 years, anything that you didn’t expect or any changes that you’ve made since you first got started that you’d like to share?
Yeah. Well, I was just reflecting today actually, just before we got on this interview call, that all the time, and this is what I was referring to earlier about learning - that all the time I find that each time I do something, I do it kind of a little bit better. I look back and I’m like “ Why did I do that last time? That was so much harder!”
You just sort of figure out things a little bit more as you go along. You figure out, maybe the word is not shortcuts, but you figure out what works best and the best technology to use. A lot of it is by trial and error, I guess is what I’m saying. So I try not to be very hard on myself when I’m trying something and it just doesn’t work because then I can just chalk it up to “Well, wasn’t that funny way back when I thought this was going to work?”
Actually, we found this was really about problem-solving and trying to make things easier. So I think there’s a lot of growth that’s possible and so I’d say some of the things that surprise me is just how much there is to learn because for me, coming from a school background, an administrative background and a teaching background, I feel like I’m super prepared to train teachers, to write curriculum, to talk to parents and students, to understand what students need in order to get into college, all of that. The school stuff is really second nature to me.
The business part and the tech part are parts that are new to me so I’m constantly being challenged whether it’s by learning about social media - which constantly is changing - or marketing, or going up and setting out on some conferences, my first booth to exhibit, and how you do that because I consider myself an educator, not a salesperson.
There’s a little danger in that because you have to wear so many hats when you’re starting something new. You’ve got to feel confident about “I’m leading with my heart, with as much knowledge as I have, I’m consulting other experts.”
I know, and the biggest part, Nati I think, is that if you really know that what you have or what you’re providing is really high quality, that you’re helping people, that people love what you’re doing or what they’re receiving from you - the product or the course - and the teachers are happy, and the people interacting with you are happy, then it makes all of the other things a little bit easier, setbacks a little bit easier.
Some other surprises have been pushbacks that I’ve had from organizations that try to prohibit students from taking courses or schools that say “You have to do it our way, you have to fit in our box” when in fact, parents and students need to advocate for themselves. If something’s not working for them, I don’t know if you’ve experienced this working with students individually, in a tutoring setting or in a teaching setting but if something’s not working for a student, you’ve got to change it. If they can’t learn in a class of 30 then you’ve got to find them smaller classes or more individualized attention or more tutoring or whatever it might be.
I think parents and students really need to advocate more for themselves. I’m happy sometimes to see that parents come in and say “You know what? My daughter wants to take Italian and I’m going to support her with that. Her school doesn’t offer it and they want us to take the language they have at their school cause they say they have the language she needs to take whatever they’re offering there. But she’s an A student, she’s a good student, she’s an athlete, she’s an artist, whatever it is. I want to support her initiative and her drive to learn this other language so I’m going to find it. They can say what they want but I’m going to let her explore her interest or I’m going to fight them and explain you’re accredited too”, that sort of thing.
Some surprises come with bureaucratic push back and that even though we’re accredited, NCAA approved, that some organizations want to stop us from teaching.
That’s interesting cause, in the end, I think the goal is to have students have the best educational experience they can that is personalized and helps them discover their own talent and passions. To hear that the institution that’s supposed to be tasked with creating these environments are not supportive of that is sad to hear, I guess. They really just lose sight of that in all of the bureaucracy.
Yeah, I think that maybe that’s a little bit, it’s too many people to push through and when you’re pushing a lot of people through if you start making a lot of exceptions, people feel like it’s going to get out of control and that there’s going to be a lack of quality control or something like that but I do think that very near in the future school districts, schools, universities are really going to have to think very carefully about what they’re offering students, about what else is out there.
I think the competitive landscape for offering students what they need is getting bigger and bigger. Technology, as I mentioned before, offer students more opportunities to go elsewhere. Just like in business, there’s competition for who’s going to be teaching this fast. Students are going to have choices. So if schools are not staying up to date with technology, if schools aren’t teaching with a teaching philosophy bent on a more project-based learning, more practical applications. I think kids can look up anything on their phones today. All this cliché I’ve heard a lot in education, people say this a lot that the days of students memorizing things and memorizing all these dates and everything are long past. They can look them up within a second.
I partially agree with that because I think that we need to keep in mind that this information now is literally at our fingertips. I do think some of those skills are really good to still learn – memorization, reciting things, flexing those muscles in our mind - but I really think in the future as we have more and more information gathered, students need to be communicators and problem solvers and writers. Their curriculum will need to reflect that. All the antiquated curriculum that teachers are holding on to in their classrooms for 40 years, they really need to rethink that because it’s a different student, it’s a different parent. The parents expect it too! The parents work and they’re on computers all day, they’re involved in the digital age so we have to listen to parents, too.
I completely agree, yes. One of the things that I really like about the format of LanguageBird is that it does add this personal relationship with someone. I think as you mentioned, everything can be accessed online and they have the information at their fingertips but what’s going to actually immerse them in this experience of learning the language is going to be that personal connection to someone. I think that technology does provide an opportunity for that to happen on an individual basis wherever the student is so that’s great.
I hope so.
What is one challenge or problem you are facing now with LanguageBird? What’s keeping you up at night?
Let’s see what’s keeping me up at night right now. Well, there are a couple of things but I’ll just talk about one. One of the things is always which way we’re going to go with technology because as soon as you implement some sort of technology, and this is one thing that I learned from working at High Tech High, is that as soon as you implement a technology, it’s almost out of date.
There’s new things all the time and better ways of doing things. We just recently did a major update to our website which is great, and it took a while and I’m really proud of that, it looks awesome, it’s up to date. Every couple of years the looks of things change, fashion, websites, etc. So that was really great.
The next step is to create more automation so that, now we're getting so many students, we want them to be able to pick their own schedule so that they don’t have to schedule through one of our staff members. They go to our website and they schedule through that, they pick their teacher. I think one of the struggles with it is:
1) Trying to figure out what technology works for us best.
2) From the educator’s standpoint, because I’m going to let the tech people figure that out - thinking about the technology flow for students. What I’m referencing is when they arrive on your website, what happens once they arrive on your website and they try to enroll in a class, then what happens? How is their process made most easy? How are they given access to their textbook? How are they given access to our online resources library? How are they connected with their teacher? All of those bits and pieces that link together.
I have a vision for how I want that to happen but I don’t think that platform is going to happen all at once. As a company that’s growing but then at starting phases, you kind of have to pick what’s most important to you.
The other educational part is thinking about that user experience that I described and what happens when, let’s say, a student or a parent starts picking their teacher, right? So I have been matching students and teachers together based on my recommendations and the student’s availability. But what happens when you put a teacher profile on the website and then the student or parent is picky?
I guess my worries that are not tested yet are: is everybody going to be picking the same teacher because they have the best picture or what might that be, rather than that they’re really a top, really awesome teacher? That’s one of my thoughts about it.
The technology is always growing, improving, changing so you have to change your business if it’s online or your program to match the technology and then how it affects your customer - your student in this case. You want to pick the right things so that they have the experience that you want them to have.
What’s your goal for LanguageBird in the next year? Where do you see it and is there one particular initiative that you are focused on for this year or next year? How do you plan that which problem to prioritize and attack?
That’s a really good question cause there are so many things right now and I’m a person who’s really drawn to a lot of things at once. I like having a lot of balls in the air so that’s quite the fun for me. There’s a lot of groups that I’d really like to be able to reach and to access in order to have them use LanguageBird. I think that there are specific student groups that in the next year I’d really like to target. I’ll name just a few of them:
1) I’d like to be able to reach out to more rural schools. Schools that are located in areas where there’s not a language teacher that can get to their school to be able to offer languages. We currently offer 11 foreign languages, which is more than any school that I know. The possibility for a school that’s in a remote area to offer 11 languages and let their students choose – here’s a menu of any world language would you like to know – and allow them to choose. I really think that that ability for a small school that’s in a rural district or just a small school allows them to add probably 10 more classes to their curriculum.
That’s fantastic, that’s great!
It gives our students a more worldly point of view, too that they would connect with somebody that’s in another country or living in another city. I think that that’s really neat especially for kids that perhaps don’t travel or don’t get to travel. We all know that as kids that their parents don’t want to take their kids too far. The travel thing is like engaging with somebody else and having that teacher-student relationship with them online, learning about their culture like traveling abroad without having a passport or getting on a plane. So that’s one initiative that I like to reach out to smaller schools and rural schools to offer them the opportunity to offer more to their students.
I mentioned athletes, there’s a lot of athletes out there that also are looking for something that’s NCAA approved, that fits into their travel schedule, so I’m interested in that.
There’s a really another interesting group of teens that I think really could use some help would be adolescents who are in treatment programs. Students who have addictions, who have eating disorders, and other problems or psychological problems that are being treated. Their parents have taken them out of school and they’ve been put in a facility and at that facility, they don’t want also to fall behind. So in addition to the stigma being taken out of their school that they’d also come back and be behind would be a lot of extra pressure on the kid that’s having a hard time.
To be able to provide them with their foreign language courses that even after they leave a treatment center, they can continue them at home cause it doesn’t matter their locations. I’d like to reach out to help some more of those students as well.
Another goal that we have is to increase our tutoring and test prep. Not all students, perhaps, can take or their school already offers the language that they want but they might need tutoring or help in test prep for the SAT subject test or the AP exams.
Then we have another category which is conversational lessons. We are expanding also to help adults who want travel Italian or travel French, that they’re going on a trip they want 12 or 24 lessons from somebody before they get there.
Also, businesses that are also expanding internationally. What adults really like about our classes is that it’s not just conversation. They like that we’re accredited and that we’re based on a curriculum because believe it or not, a lot of adults really like the idea of having homework, being accountable, because they really want, they’re passionate about learning it and they want to learn it fast. They want a curriculum, they want a textbook, and they also want the flexibility of their schedule. If they’re an executive or a busy mom or whatever it might be, they’ll say “I want my lessons at 9 AM on a Saturday” or whatever fits into their travel schedules.
We’re expanding in a few different ways and I think it’s really exciting. It’s really fun for me to meet these people that are coming across our path that want to learn different languages and for the variety of different reasons that they come for. It’s really fun.
That’s great! It sounds like an amazing journey and I really like hearing from the customer experience perspective. It’s interesting to see how many people want to learn languages and for the different reasons that you mentioned. I know I see a lot of, across different sites, the need for Spanish teachers of all ages. Like a 2-year old that’s in some kind of an immersion program to an adult who is traveling abroad and wants to prepare for that trip. That’s great that you’ll be able to cover all of those different needs.
Yeah, that’s the goal for sure.
I know we’re getting to the end of our hour Karyn and I just want to ask you are there any other projects that working on that you’d like to share about?
Yeah! I guess one project that we have going right now that we’ve started is our Chirp Room chat rooms. It’s just beginning but basically, they were started from a parent of home-schooled twins who said “We really love your courses and I love that my daughters are speaking to someone in Spain and learning how to speak and it’s fantastic but they’re home-schooled and we’d like a little bit of a classroom experience as well. Can we do that?”
You know, I really want to keep everything one-to-one because I really felt that’s the best, most effective way to work and to study. So I thought about it a little bit and we decided to try out and we’re implementing this Chirp Room chatroom. Right now, they’re just for teenagers. They’re just for high school students ages 12-18 and we have 4 different languages – French, Italian, German and Spanish.
We have them at various times during the week, mostly after school and on the weekends. And they’re free; they’re totally free for any high school student to sign up for. They work just like a little classroom. They enter a conference room; a video chatroom and they can all see each other and they can raise their hands and they can ask questions in the chat box.
They’re there to practice speaking because a lot of students are in 20-30 person classrooms and perhaps good students interested in the language but you’ve got a 50-minute to 1 ½ hour-long period. With that many students in the class, you don’t get to practice very much speaking with a native speaker. So we had one of our instructors that’s in the chatroom with them – the Chirp Room. They get to do that, they just chirp away.
The teacher will lead them in a conversation; bring up a scenario, something that’s interesting to them like ordering at a restaurant. Here’s your menu, order it from me, getting around or asking for directions, introducing themselves. So that they get to practice at speaking, they’re in a safe environment, it’s all teenagers and moderated by an adult. They just can hop in there and practice speaking.
That’s a service that we currently offer that’s free to any student no matter where they are, if they’re enrolled in our programs or not. That’s one thing that I’m excited about is maintaining some of those Chirp Rooms and just having them available for students and giving back to schools that way because schools, I know, are sometimes in a hard place where they can’t offer a lot of individual instruction or they can’t offer too much help with students being able to speak a lot in a classroom.
This gives them another opportunity that they can offer as extra credit in the language class or just through their PTAs, tell parents that this exists, if somebody needs tutoring or more help they can hop in there and ask questions. I’m excited about that and I hope that in the future because now adults are asking for them, that maybe we’d expand to that and to other languages as well. Right now, anybody can sign up on our website for French, German, Italian or Spanish.
This is great! One, I love the name. It’s great that you were responsive to this parent, right? Somebody gave an idea and you’re trying it out like startups do and this might take you in a completely different path and it’s your adding value to the customer and to people that could become LanguageBird users.
Yeah, totally.
I didn’t know that anyone could sign up so I’ll definitely pass this along to my students. I think it’s a great way for them to practice their Spanish.
Yeah, absolutely. Your point of opening up to suggestions from your customers - students, parents, whatever it may be - in your business or school. A lot of times we forget that you really have to listen to them. Schools are businesses too. Schools, even public schools or private schools, whatever it may be, you want to make sure people are happy. When they’re happy they feel safe, they’re getting educated, they’re happy sending their kids, they trust you, etc. It’s important to listen to them, I think, but more so than that like you mentioned, they come up with ideas for what they want or what they need. They would be foolish not to listen to.
I always try to survey, even though it’s a pain sometimes to get them to participate. Sometimes you have to call and ask, rather than having somebody follow a link, but always to follow up with a call and to survey and to see what people think or what they need or what they would add and not be afraid of suggestions, not take them personally like “You’re not offering enough”. Take them as suggestions for something you can further implement, I think, is a really good thing to do in all schools.
Yes, yes. Someone once told me that you design a product initially and your customer will guide you on where to go next.
Yeah, that’s a really good way to say it. For sure, I agree.
OK, Karyn is there anything else that you’d like to add and also, where can people find you?
Where can people find me? They can connect to me on our website which is languagebird.com. They can connect to me on LinkedIn; maybe you can provide my Linkedin link. You could always call LanguageBird. We have a cute phone number, are you ready for this? You can call LanguageBird at 844-700-BIRD. When you listen to the prompter, the message will tell you, I think it’s Extension 1 to reach me directly. You can phone me that way to ask any questions you might need.
Dr. Karyn Koven
LanguageBird
1-844-700-BIRD
Music: www.bensound.com