One of the most innovative products that have been developed at inlingua International recently is the inlingua Ebook, or flex-e-book. This has been designed to enhance the learners’ experience of language learning at an inlingua center and provide courses that can target a learner’s needs more accurately. In order to get a clearer picture of the strengths and applications of the flex-e-book, we interviewed Christian Scheidegger, the Pedagogical Manager at inlingua International, Bern.
PL: Peter Lambie, Method and Materials Consultant
CS: Christian Scheidegger, Pedagogical Manager
PL: What exactly is the flex-e-book?
CS: The flex-e-book is a customizable eBook platform where you can download single units of a book or an entire book onto electronic devices and then use them wherever you want to.
PL: Which devices is it on?
CS: It’s basically available for Android devices and IOS devices – so, Apple devices. It means that you can use them on tablets with the Android or Apple system and you can use them on smartphones with those two systems as well.
PL: What is the purpose and aim of the flex-e-book?
CS: The most powerful idea behind it was that it’s no longer an entire book that you need to work through. You can put together a collection of units even from different books in order to create customized courses. So you can concentrate on one topic or you can cover a couple of topics that are not in the same book (or are not at the level you would have it) and so this is really the strength of the flex-e-book, that you can combine units according to the needs of a customer. You can have three units, six units, ten units whatever the timeframe for a course of a customer is.
This is really the main purpose of the flex-e-book, but in addition to that you can also have all the standard books as they exist in the printed form. You can have them one-to-one in the flex-e-book format which also offers advantages like having the audio files integrated.
Even more importantly most exercises are interactive so people can enter the solutions for exercises directly into the eBook and get an immediate response if it was correct or not. Open activities like writing an email or short letter or something like this will be saved. What the learner writes into the tablet will be saved and can then be discussed during the course or on another occasion with the trainer.
PL: How do centers get it?
CS: The centers need to subscribe to the flex-e-book service and then they will get access to the back end where the flex-e-book can be compiled and ordered in the amount of copies they would need. For every eBook, centers will get a unique code which has to be transferred to the learner. The learner then needs to download the app on his device and with the download code he is then able to download that flex-e-book onto his device.
PL: What does it contain?
CS: If it is a standard book it’s just a copy of a printed book from the first to the last page with everything exactly the same as in the printed book.
If it’s a compiled book you will get everything that belongs to a certain unit including Extra Practice or Language Practice. Parts that are at the back of the book would then be together with that specific unit. You won’t find the solutions in the book because they are already integrated into the interactive activities. You get the audio files for the listening activities with it and, in the future, maybe even videos.
PL: How is it used in a lesson?
CS: You can use the flex-e-book pretty much in the same way you would use a standard book, but instead of having the actual paper version in front of you, people would need to have their device with them to work in the book.
In addition, learners can also work at home or when they travel. Wherever they are, they will have it on the device. For the trainer, I would say it’s a huge advantage, because you have the course book on your device – if you have the flex-e-book – and you have all the audio files with it. You don’t need an additional CD player or any other device to play the listening activities. With every unit from the customized book, the Trainer Resource Pack (TRP) that corresponds to that unit is delivered in a separate eBook. This is not the case for the standard books, because that would be a huge document and we assume that the TRP of a certain book would be somewhere in the library of the center or the trainer.
PL: Are their plans for future development?
CS: Yes, we have plans for future development. Right now, the flex-e-book is more-or-less a one-to-one replica of the printed book. This may not be convenient in some cases where you have a smartphone with a small screen, for instance. One page is rather small, so you have to scroll on that. This is not really user friendly.
The plans are that we deliver the content of a unit in a format that is more adapted to the medium. So, instead of having one whole page on a smartphone screen you will maybe just have one exercise, and this will be displayed in a size that is better to read and to understand the context.
We would also like to add more multi-media content, maybe, so you don’t just have written exercises and listening activities, but you also have video that you can play: things that enhance the learners experience and are not possible with a printed