Online Italian classes
Over the last month or so we’ve been offering free online Italian conversation groups.
Perhaps you were one of the many students from around the world who joined Paolo online for a chat in Italian?
In all, we we ran fifteen 30-minute sessions. It was a sort of experiment…
Could we successfully offer online GROUP classes?
We wanted to find out if it would be possible to supplement our offer of individual Italian lessons with something a little more sociable and well… affordable.
Individual Italian lessons are fine if you have specific needs, or if your priority is to get as much talking in as possible.
But they can seem rather costly: a private lesson with a decent professional Italian teacher is never going to be cheap, and we know that the individual option is not going to be possible for everyone.
The system we’ve been testing is aimed at companies who use it to do video-conferencing.
We hoped to find out if we could use it to offer group classes. As far as we’re aware, no one else is doing this.
Well, the trials were useful: we learnt plenty of lessons, resolved a few technical issues, and the feedback overall was mostly good.
So…
Announcing: affordable online Italian conversation classes!
This being something completely new, we were a little unsure how to organise it.
How to organise a class for students who might be anywhere in the world, in any one of dozens of different time zones?
In the end we decided to offer the class at a fixed time each week.
If it works out, we’ll consider offering alternative groups at other times and on other days.
But the first group is programmed for Wednesdays at 14.00 Italian time. The teacher will be Paolo, as for the trials.
This will be a conversation group. The aim is to give you practice speaking (and listening to) Italian.
Up to six people (including the teacher) will be sharing video and audio, and making friends!
Each class lasts an hour.
For five weeks, the cost is just €49.99, that’s (fractionally) under €10 per hour.
The first lesson will be on Wednesday 12th of March. There are 5 places available. To make sure one of them will be yours, click here.
Sue says
March 5, 2014 at 10:37 amI’ve taken the plunge! Please be patient with me, I panic and every Italian word I know flies out of my head!
Daniel says
March 5, 2014 at 10:59 amThat’s great, Sue! Thank you so much for your confidence in us. We hope you’ll find the lessons useful.
But don’t worry… I think most people who participated in the trials felt the same way at first.
The trick, maybe, is not to have high expectations of yourself. Every conversation needs listeners too, but if you want to speak there’s no pressure at all to say anything complex.
The point of a conversation lesson is to encourage students to get used to the sensations (difficulties, but also satisfactions) of communicating in a language which is much less familiar to them than their native tongue.
Mostly it’s just a question of time…
Hope that helps!
July Rice says
March 5, 2014 at 10:05 amI solved the problem – non era difficile!
July Rice says
March 5, 2014 at 9:36 amI am having trouble paying! Has anyone else experienced this? The system will not let me pay by credit card or paypall. I’ll keep trying. July