In order to make our English language program easier to use and more accessible in geographies with poor Internet, we have now launched a completely new website with ELT Tiger. Like our foreign language courses, ELT Tiger now leverages the Fedora platform for hosting video-based courses. Using Fedora allows us to spend less time on managing the online platform and more time on creating new resources and courses.
The timing for this new ELT Tiger website is also critical. As we watch the horrors in Syria and the diaspora of Arabic-speaking refugees across Europe, we have to ask ourselves: What can we do to help? The largest impact we at Linguisticator can have is to provide language training at scale - a capability we are uniquely positioned to provide. ELT Tiger was built for Arabic speakers, tested in the harshest teaching conditions in Libya, and designed to be delivered at scale and without the need for native speaker instructors.
Over the coming weeks, we will be working to find the right pathways to offer training to refugees, particularly those coming to the UK (where English language will be essential). If you as a reader have any contacts or suggestions, please contact us - this is not something we can do entirely on our own. Together, however, we have the ability to help those in need and provide them with the means to establish a new life.
So many of those fleeing war are men and women with high levels of education and professional expertise - the type of people any intelligent country would want to welcome with open arms. Doctors, engineers, professors, and all manner of professionals can be easily found among the millions of refugees in camps in Lebanon and Jordan and marching west across Europe. A friend recently sent me this article from the NY Times, showing satellite imagery of Syria at night four years apart. The country has gone dark. Vibrant cities full of life are now smoldering piles of rubble. To me, these satellite images were particularly moving, as they show the real scale of change in Syria.
We're very excited to have ELT Tiger revamped and more powerful than ever before. We hope it will be of use to those who need to learn English to start a new life far from home.