Parlez Francais (and More) With eduFire
Ecoutez, et repetez. eduFire is a new startup that promises to teach you a language through live online video chat tutorials. The service, which officially launched last week, has more than 500 teachers instructing in over 30 different languages.
A visitor to eduFire can either jump into a spontaneous session with a teacher that’s already online, or schedule a lesson for a later date. Prices for each session are determined by the teacher but cost at least $10 an hour, of which eduFire takes a 15 percent cut.
Anyone can sign up to be a teacher on the site; the community is tasked with weeding out the good from the bad. Teachers can provide an intro video to help sell their services, and to give both parties a chance to decide if they’re a good fit for one another, the first 10 minutes of the first session are free. The site currently only offers one-to-one sessions, but plans to roll out one-to-many sessions as well.
Jon Bischke, eduFire’s founder and CEO, says there have been 500 sessions on the site since it soft-launched 60 days ago, with the average user doing 2.5 sessions each.
The company has eight full- and part-time employees and has raised half a million in angel funding. And according to eduFire, languages are just the beginning; it says it will expand into other areas of learning as well.
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[...] it’s great to see some major tech news sites picking up on this great service. Techcrunch and Newteevee are just two sites to run a story about eduFire.com and the crew at muchosmedia is exited to [...]
muchosmedia - rich internet applications…
— 8:02 AM on June 3, 2008
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[...] Parlez Francais (and More) With eduFire (NewTeeVee) [...]
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[...] a little over a year ago, eduFire says it now has roughly 5,000 teachers and that 30,000 students have signed up so far. The [...]
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I love http://www.edufire.com! I am improving my Spanish, and making friends as well. It is a very friendly community. I have never taken a college class where I got to try out the teacher for an hour to see if we clicked. This is great, if one tutor is not a good fit you can certainly try another.
I tried it out and it’s okay. To be honest, the rates are quite high and the quality of tutoring delivered isn’t that great.
There is no curriculum or take-home content that accompanies the video other than the relatively thin materials edufire designs. I found them through a blog and have found that they have their shills all over the place so Tina might just be another one of those. Sigh.
I agree this site; http://www.edufire.com has been very helpful and enjoyable with my journey to learn Italian and Spanish (at the same time nevertheless). The tutors are great; very helpful and knowlegdable (they know their stuff) and I think the video chat thing is great because I pick a time that suits me. The free tools such as flashcards, videos and forums are also a big help. Great site!!
edufire is pretty cool. I have tried it once and may use it again. Could be handy for a trip to learn a few phrases.
The prices at http://www.linkua.com are much lower than in Edufire.com, many teachers offer even FREE classes.