official italki blog

Finding a teacher that’s right for a student can be a time-consuming process. Every student has different goals, and comes from a different background. Right now, students have to take the initiative to find a teacher. However, shouldn’t there also be a way for students to post what they are looking for, so interested teachers can contact the students?

That’s why we’re trying an experiment that we’re calling Learning Requests – http://www.italki.com/teachers/learning_request.htm (you must be logged in)

With Learning Requests, students can submit information about their:

• Background in the language
• What type of lessons they want
• Their budget
• Time availability

After a student submits a Learning Request, italki will try its best to match up teachers that would be the most capable of helping the student to achieve his or her learning goals. italki will contact those teachers. Finally, italki will return a list of suggested teachers back to the student.

Only students that have purchased italki Credits (ITC) can use this feature.

We hope that this feature will be helpful for students who need help finding a teacher. We think this feature will eventually evolve into a system where teachers can easily view the demand for their services. If you’re a teacher and would like to be on a recommended list for students, please send us an email to teacherhelp at italki dot com.

If you have suggestions about how we can help match students and teachers, please feel free to send us ideas through our feedback form or through our email at feedback at italki dot com.

It seems a number of people are still not familiar with the Language Marketplace, including how to choose a good teacher, and how much it costs to learn online.  We have a few tutorial videos (English, Español, Deutsch, Italiano, and Français) explaining how the Language Teachers section works.  But for those of you who prefer the text form, here’s another explanation.

Click on Language Teachers in the left-hand navigation box.

First, choose your search criteria:

Teaches: Choose the language you’re looking to study. This lists the language the teacher will teach you.

Professional Teacher / Language Tutor: Do you need a teacher with professional teaching experience, or is a language tutor more suitable for your learning? More explanation of this here.

Native Speaker: Do you wish to learn from someone who speaks that language as their mother tongue? If you’re an advanced learner of the language, this may be more important to you than for beginners. Check this to find native speaking teachers of the language you’re learning.

Free Trial Available: If you want to have a trial session with the teacher before you pay for lessons, mark this option and you will only be shown teachers who offer Free Trial.  (You must have ITC in your account to be a Free Trial.)

Price (ITC per hour): If you only want to be shown teachers who fit within your budget, you may select it here. ITC are italki’s internal currency, known as italki Credits or ITCs.  US$1 = 10ITC.

Then click Browse to search by your specified criteria.

Second, after your new personalized list has loaded, choose which order in which you want to view the matching teachers.

Ratings: Sorts from highest to lowest (none) the level of positive feedback ratings the teacher has received from other italki students.  Shown by 1-5 Gold Stars.  More details here in our FAQ.

Price: Sorts from lowest to highest price in ITC per hour.  ITC are not US$.  1 ITC equals US$0.1

Once you find a few teachers that match your criteria and interests, click on their picture or name to few their profile.  Here you can learn more about them, check their availability schedule, and book a session with them.

Learning online is very quick, easy, and affordable.  Get started today!

Today we updated our social translation system to make it easier for members to help translate italki into other languages.  The new system handles translation on a page-by-page basis. This way, if you see a bad translation, you can click the “Translate this page” button, and immediately submit a correction.

The “Translate this page” link is located in the upper right-hand corner. When you click on it, it will open a new window or tab.  By opening the translate page side-by-side with the original site, you can refer back to the original page to get better understanding of the context.

The translate page is broken into three sections.
1. Phrases that haven’t been translated yet
2. Phrases that have translations submitted
3. Phrases that have been locked.
If you start at the top, you can start translating by just typing in the box and hitting enter or by clicking “Submit”. Don’t worry if you see phrases that don’t seem to be on the page — those are phrases that might be useful for other users.

All the phrases that have at least one translation are listed in the second section. If you see a translation that could be improved, you can click on “vote / fix”. You should be able to see a list of submitted translations. You can vote on the submitted translations or submit a translation of your own.

One thing about crowdsourcing changes to a website is that there is a time delay before having a fully translated site. This is particularly true as we’ve made a lot of changes to the site in the past few months. As new features come online, more and more translations need to be updated. We realize that it is inconvenient to deal with a site that isn’t fully translated (or translated well), and we hope you’ll help us get the site ready in your language. We will periodically merge the changes to the main site.

Finally, since we are using English as the base language for the website, if you run into bad English on the site, please let us know through our feedback or through email (feedback at italki). We want to avoid having errors translated throughout the site.

Thanks again! We really believe that italki is a product of our community, so we want to thank you in advance for all of your help.

The italki team

We’re excited that we have expanded the Language Marketplace to include language companies and schools. Now language learning companies can partner with italki and offer their services and products to italki users. We think this is a major step towards making italki a destination site for language learning.

Our first partner company, Eleutian Technology, targets the largest language learning market in the world: Learning English.  Eleutian uses American certified-school teachers and the highly-regarded Pearson English Language Learning Instruction System (ELLIS) to teach English online.

click to go to marketplace

Language Learning Ecosystem

Our plan is to expand the marketplace to include every language, and to support a variety of services.  By creating an ecosystem for language learning, we believe everyone benefits:  students, independent teachers, language training companies, and application developers.

Students benefit by having more choices.  They can pay for premium services, or use the free community generated ones.  Students are able to share information about different service providers and make informed choices.  Students are also able to pick and choose a combination of services that may be useful to them.  Most of all, a central location helps students find online providers of language education.

Teachers and companies benefit by having an active market with demand for their service.  Companies and teachers can reach out to students around the world, and transact without having to deal with individual payment issues.  Quality teachers and companies also benefit by having their reputation socially confirmed by their customers.

Again, we’re thrilled to be opening our expanded marketplace, and to have Eleutian join us as our first partner.  If you’re not learning English, just be patient — we’re planning to add more companies and services for other languages soon. If you represent a company that might be interested in partnering with italki, please contact us at business at italki dot com.

View the press release （PDF)

The italki Team

One important aspect of learning a language is getting connected into a community of students and teachers.  That’s why we revised our Groups function on italki.  We wanted to make it easier to have discussions about every aspect of learning a language.  

What we’ve done is create official italki Groups for every language.  Each language now has five official groups called:

• Learning the language
• Teachers and Schools
• Tests and Exams
• Culture and Society
• Travel, Living Abroad and Study Abroad

We made this change in order to consolidate discussions in each language.  All of the previous user-created groups still exist, and you can still create your own group.  As with before, each group is basically a forum where members of the group can create a topic and start a discussions with other group members. 

We also wanted to highlight a few interesting ways you could use groups.

Many teachers have asked us how they can reach students who are interested in paid tutoring sessions.  Teachers can now post information about themselves in the Teachers and Schools Group (example: Teachers and Schools for learning English).  We think this could be a great place for teachers to market to students, and for students to learn more about a teacher’s background and teaching style.

Another interesting use of groups could be for sharing test knowledge (example: Tests and Exams for learning English.   Now if you are taking a language test such as the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foriegn Language), the HSK (the main test for Chinese proficiency), or the AP Spanish test (US College Board’s test of Spanish competency) — you should be able to find discussions about how to prepare for them in the Tests and Exams group for that language.  

In general, we just wanted to make it easier for the italki community to connect and communicate with each other.  If you have any questions about how to use groups or want to send us any feedback on the site changes, please click on our feedback link or send us an email (feedback at italki dot com). Your opinions really help us understand where we need to improve the site. And keep reading our blog – we’ll be letting you know about our future updates here.

Our product team has been working on a number of improvements on the website. Our latest improvement has been to reorganize the personal homepage.

As soon as you login, you can see the new blackboard and layout. First, it’s easier to comment and ask questions on the new blackboard. In addition, now you will be able to see your blackboard posts combined with questions that you have asked. You can also reply in a thread, so your replies can stay linked together.

We’ve also added a side column that has updates from your italki friends. We hope this will make learning a language more social. Now you can see what your italki friends are doing. We hope you’ll spend a little time to answer questions from your friends, or help them with an language issue they are facing.

We’ve also made a change to timezones recently. Many of you may have noticed that you have been asked to reselect your timezone. This is important as many students are scheduling lessons on italki, and issues like daylight savings make it crucial to synchronize clocks.

As always, please keep the feedback coming through our feedback link or through email (feedback at italki dot com). Your opinions really help us work on where we can improve the site. And keep checking out our blog. We have many more updates coming up soon, and we’ll always let you know about them here.

The italki team