Iestyn and I have been chatting about a kind of pivot for SSiW - and we’d love to hear what you think about it before we start to put the building blocks in place.
Up until now, we’ve thought of ourselves as a language teaching company. Clearly, this has gone okay with Welsh - but we’ve made no real headway with Spanish, despite an insane amount of different attempts.
We’re now slowly rolling out a ‘have it for free’ approach to Spanish on Facebook, hoping that will help us build an audience for intensive Spanish courses - and it’s got me thinking…
For a long time, I’ve been wanting to do more for our ‘finished it all’ students - because I know that however well they’re doing, very few students get to the end of Course 3 (or what’s available of Level 3) and feel that they’ve finished.
So far, this has been constrained by resources - we’ve been plugging away at Level 3, and I want to build the dialogue approach to the first 4000 words after that - but it struck me that maybe we could be doing more helpful stuff even now, before finishing the a->z learning journey.
For example, we could find out how much it would cost to get someone to record a 30 minute conversation (and provide a transcript and translation) each month… and provide it at normal and 2x and 3x speed…
But also…
We could start sponsoring (via prizes) the production of content in Welsh… so we could offer a monthly prize for the best short story submitted to us…
Or a monthly prize for the best song… poem… play… short film…
And then we separate the lessons from the listening exercises/content…
So for Spanish right now, and other languages next year (SSiBorg willing!), if we give all the lessons away and then have valuable extra stuff for listening/wider practice - we sort of move in the direction of being a media company which teaches languages for free in order to build an audience for the media content (and which helps generate more media content in smaller languages).
Which feels right, somehow…
What do you think?