How do you build free language education in every language, for everyone? This is the central question that motivates our work at Wikiotics and today we unveil the first step toward that goal. We call it “The Last Language Textbook.”
The Last Language Textbook is a campaign to build a completely free collection of language lessons that can serve as a textbook replacement, available on the web, for anyone learning introductory English. We are building this material collaboratively using our existing picture choice, podcast, and multiple choice lesson types, along with a new “story book” one and traditional text wiki pages.
Unlike traditional textbooks, our materials are open and designed to grow and change with the community. Open materials can benefit from the expertise of the millions of language teachers and billions of language students in the world, growing into better resources for the community one correction or personalization at a time.
With your help we can build the Last Language Textbook into an instruction tool so flexible and accessible that it makes all non-open English textbooks obsolete. There are many ways to get involved, regardless of your skill level or experience with teaching. You can:
- Write example sentences for use in lessons,
- Transcribe or record existing sentences, or
- Organize and explain these source materials into a new language lesson.
If you know English well enough to read this blog post, you have something to contribute. The new participate page has more details about the different ways to lend a hand, even if you only have two minutes.
At the end of the summer, we will host a summit for all participating organizations. If your organization would like to partner with us in this campaign, please contact us.
Please, take a minute to join us and follow our progress.