Brazilian Kids Learn English by Video Chatting With Elderly Americans
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That brought tears to my eyes. It was such a joy to see the expressions on the faces of both the Brazilian and the hip elderly person on the other side.
Bookmarked under "Things that will make you smile"
The trick is avoiding it becoming the next chat roulette :/
I'm not sure how well that concept caught on though... And if you check out their website, they seem to have pivoted to a more traditional "livestreamed language classes" model.
As for the teacher, working in a school like the ones mentioned, you get low pay (not too many years ago it was about $7/hr) and no leeway in terms of hours and method. Being a private, one-on-one teacher, though, one can command higher prices ($30-50/hr in the largest cities) and have more control over everything (just not always whether the students keep their appointments).
Nonetheless, cool video in the link.
To whoever changed it: why didn't you just make a second thread?
So it's not underhand at all but it's also not an objective display of this program. It's an ad, designed to give you warm fuzzies and, if you're in the target demographic, consider signing up as a fee-paying student at the school featured.
As others have said in this thread, similar projects have been tried and have not really gained traction. Not saying that some such project may not eventually succeed but given that there is no objective data being given on the success of this program in the video, one should probably be somewhat sceptical that this is anything more than a marketing tool.
Nice. It's basicly a well managed chatroulette clone.
(EDIT: not quite, it also needs to record.)
Or try "web video conference server open source"
https://code.google.com/p/openmeetings/
http://bigbluebutton.org (can record too)
Greggman mentioned WEBrtc, that would probably be cleaner/simpler, but it's p2p right, so the server can't record? perhaps try https://www.webrtc-experiment.com/RecordRTC/ ?
If there were an organized platform where people could chat with speakers from all over the world in order to learn their language and culture it would be a fantastic thing.
Someone else came up with the idea. "School in the cloud"
This on the other hand, is geared toward helping anyone who wants to learn a new foreign language and connecting them to ones who do speak that language and they benefit from having someone who is willing to talk to them. So the goals, and users/usage are very different, aside from one is aim towards one to many, and the other more one on one.
I know there are other companies doing this. My friend is learning English through http://langrich.com which connects students of any age in Japan to people in cheap labor countries that speak English like the Philipeans for example.
There's plenty of technical solutions already, you may just want a little glue with good ux design, fast internet, and good support staff, especially for the elderly.
In this example, someone setup a relationship between a retirement home and an English learning school. Outside of that, it would probably turn into a chatroulete.
so this "chat-roulette clone" has a lot if impact.