English Course or English Corps? Educ.ar and Skype

Here´s an idea that I had for Educ.ar that combines the power of the largest educational portal in Argentina with Skype´s 130 million global community, and that is to create a program in which Skype members volunteer to teach English to kids in Argentina.

The main objective here is to create an environment of equal opportunity for Argentine kids, cause whether we like it or not not, speaking English is a handicap. Now this is how it would work. Educators at Educ.ar would put together English courses that are easy to teach by native speakers and offer students, who are native speakers, to teach this curriculum to Argentine kids over Skype. Skype would promote this program in its web site so as to find teachers. Students would sign up for lessons at Educ.ar and go on over Skype.

Skype is perfect cause it allows the combination of a web cam, with writing in a chat, with the ability to send files. Of course other programs would also work. Wengo has just launched a program oriented to something like this but they lack the community. And Instant Messenger has a huge community, but, personally, I would not know how to get to them, I have less contacts at Microsoft. I do have great contacts at Google, who are also my partners, but unfortunately Google Talk does not have a large community. Instead Skype, who is my partner at FON and it is easier for me at least to propose the idea to them. Janus and Niklas of Skype are always looking for something good to do anyway as they are caring people (i had to say this now that the holiday season is approaching ;).

I end with a warning, a lot of my ideas actually never get implemented. But I don´t mind blogging when I have them as this blog is about exactly that, having ideas and trying to implement them, some succeed, some fail.