New Service: Learning Objects from SCOLA

MCCLELLAND, Iowa (January 28, 2011)—SCOLA, a nonprofit educational organization, recently announced the launch of its newest subscription service: Learning Objects. SCOLA receives and rebroadcasts television programming from over 100 different countries and offers a wide variety of learning resources for over 100 different languages and dialects.

SCOLA Learning Objects are multimedia lessons that help students acquire a language, using a variety of technology, such as video, audio and self-correcting questions. Each lesson takes 45 - 60 minutes to complete and is based off of a short TV program video clip.

Currently SCOLA Learning Objects subscription contains 18 lessons in Russian, Turkish and Korean, and SCOLA expects to have 40 lessons in 5 languages available by the end of February 2011.

Jennifer Hawks, SCOLA’s Special Projects Manager, says “SCOLA’s Learning Objects is an extremely unique service in that the lessons center around video clips, which I believe no other company offers.” The video clips are taken from soap opera programs in Russian, Turkish and Korean, and the lessons focus on both linguistics and culture.

SCOLA’s Learning Objects gives students a comprehensive and interactive look at language use in a clear cultural context, helping language learners further develop their skills.

SCOLA is centrally located in Iowa to easily bring down signals from a multitude of satellites over both coasts. SCOLA offers TV and radio news, cultural programming and many other exciting services including these:

-World TV Online is authentic television programming from more than 100 countries and regions and more than 100 languages.
-Insta-Class is an extensive collection of Insta-Lessons based on actual foreign video segments with new lessons posted once a week.
-Specialized Word Video Search is a searchable collection of word pairs (English to Other Language) mapped to video clips containing the word being used and separate audio pronunciations.
-People and Places is a unique album of pictures submitted by SCOLA friends from around the world.
-Digital Archive is a vast collection of authentic SCOLA videos which can be viewed online from the SCOLA website or saved in MPEG 2 or MPEG 4 format.
-“On the Street” Videos are natively produced videos of everyday people speaking about everyday things.
-Foreign Text is an online library of newspapers, magazines, poetry, children’s books and more.
-International Radio is a collection of select radio broadcasts searchable by country, language and broadcast date.
-Language Training Materials are videos that provide native perspective overviews on various topics.
-Spoken Word allows language learners to communicate directly with native speakers through recording and posting short video clips to a discussion forum.
-Learning Objects are detailed, multimedia language lessons centered around video clips from television programs.

Visit the SCOLA website at http://www.scola.org/Scola/Default.aspx