For me, a few years ago, online learning was synonymous with boredom, waste of time, often soporific tools, when we didn't talk about the technical difficulties encountered.
I knew platforms where you could only fill in exercises with holes, without interest (no more than a classical grammar method anyway), not exciting.
As we know it, when you work alone, motivation is the first motor of success. And this motivation, strong when you decide to learn a foreign language, can quickly unravel over time.
I searched for a long time for a method that would not bore our learners, that would make them want to connect, and reconnect, to the program of course but also to other learners. Because even if you work alone at home, you don't necessarily want to be alone all the time, nor to talk to yourself, even in a foreign language!
We searched and searched and after inconclusive and unexciting tests, but also tests that seemed to be brilliant, avant-gardist even a few years ago, but finally irrelevant for our learners, we found it!
Elearning that made us, the trainers, want to learn a new language!
At last, learning based on our interests, short, multiple educational videos based on current events and daily news, everyday subjects: work, movies, ecology, travel, sports and so on.
Social learning! To finally use what we learn and share with other learners from different countries our opinions on various subjects.
But above all, e-learning that doesn't force you to work from home but that you can practice when you take the streetcar, the train, when you wait patiently at your doctor's, when you're at the beach, learning that follows you in your daily life.
So yes, I am reconciled with e-learning and I believe that it is really a factor of progress in the learning of a foreign language but I admit that two years of Covid have convinced me that whatever happens, and even if it is the new trend, the "remote everything", the human remains essential and nothing will replace the "real" exchanges, all gathered in the same place, not virtual. Because even if everyone wants to keep a distance, we are happy to meet and see each other in a way that is different from a screen.
E-learning is good, it is sometimes fabulous, but coupled with face-to-face sessions, it's even better!
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