GlobalEnglish is a Brisbane, California headquartered company that has created a comprehensive offering to try and fill that need. The firm provides online assessment, e-learning and support for business English communication. According to Rajith Nair, the EMEA regional director for GlobalEnglish, their web-based corporate learning service for business English offers a blend of interactive course content, progress assessment and performance support. Additionally, a complete suite of administrative tools helps companies in managing, measuring and tracking English learning performance across the organization. Nair added that core English coursework is supplemented with personal coaching, consisting of one-to-one private discussion sessions with native English speaking coaches. There are also workplace productivity tools, such as translation, which provide support for job-related tasks.
Nair remarked that GlobalEnglish is already in use at GCC-headquartered organizations such as Saudi Aramco, King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, Emirates Airline and Emirates NBD. In the near future, Nair expects several more organizations in the Kingdom’s oil & gas, power and government sectors to sign up with GlobalEnglish. Naizak is the company’s Saudi representative.
Nair explained that GlobalEnglish is currently only offered as a corporate product with organizations required to take a minimum of 50 seats on a three year contract. The starting cost per seat is $600 annually, with that price dropping for larger contracts. Companies offering GlobalEnglish are asked to give at least one year of access to each employee brought into the program.
What’s the reality of GlobalEnglish for learners? Arab News spoke with Waleed, a young Saudi executive who works at one of the international firms using GlobalEnglish on a worldwide basis. Waleed said that he had found the program useful, but not ideal. When he had access to the program, he used its translation feature daily and thought highly of the program’s features that offered advice on mastering English language interactions in the workplace. He was disappointed with the personal language coaching, as it was nearly impossible to conveniently schedule coaching services and he believes that interaction of this sort once a week is not enough. The feedback he received on his written essays was inadequate as well. He also discovered early on that he could cheat on the quizzes in the core coursework section by pressing the “back” key after the quiz answers were revealed and then re-selecting the correct answers.
When he ran into an extremely busy few months at work and didn’t have time to devote to the GlobalEnglish program, his employer terminated his access. Waleed now pays for English tutoring from his own pocket. “Being fluent in English is essential for my career,” he explained. “With my job and family obligations I have a limited amount of time to study. Working with a tutor on a one-to-one basis allows me to fit the most learning into the time I have available. That learning is targeted to my requirements and my industry.”
In responding to Waleed’s comments, Deepak Desai, CEO, GlobalEnglish said that the company would be releasing a new version of Global English in the first quarter of 2011, which in part addresses the problems with personal tuition and feedback, particularly for written English. He emphasized that the biggest challenge for learners is to spend the needed time with the GlobalEnglish service, which now encompasses more than 1,200 hours of content. “It is spending the time and having a course of action that gives the results,” he remarked. Desai highlighted the achievement of an employee of Emirates NBD who gained the skills to become a certified English language instructor, in part through her use of GlobalEnglish.
“Learning English or any language is not easy. It needs time and effort,” said Desai. “Online learning is very different from traditional classroom learning. It’s very self-driven and very self-directed. I think that in the transition to online learning, it is taking all of us time to adjust to the new reality that my learning is my responsibility and I have to do it at my pace.”
According to Desai, online learning is the future of learning. It is more cost effective and more personalized than classroom learning. The GlobalEnglish corporate learning service can be accessed almost anywhere — even in remote locations where there would be no chance to attend traditional English language classes.
“The reason I’m in this business is I love being in a business that is part of aspirations and dreams,” said Desai. “Our goal at GlobalEnglish is to democratize the access to English because English is a way to improve your life, get a better job, be a global citizen and be able to communicate with everyone.”
— MYBI
