Business: Public School District
Location: Burien, WA
The Company
Highline Public Schools, a public school district located just south of Seattle WA., has nearly 18,000 students whose families speak over 80 different languages. The district has developed a Translation & Interpretation program to train bilingual high-school students for careers using their language skills. The Speak YOUR Languages video series featuring bilingual adults with interesting and rewarding careers was developed for use in this program (see www.speakyourlanguages.com).
As part of this project, the district also developed a training course for monolingual English-speaking teachers and administrators to enable them to communicate more effectively with non-English-speaking families through a bilingual interpreter.
The Challenge The ReadyGo WCB Solution The course is useful for all types of organizations including businesses, professional services, non-profits, government agencies and educational institutions. You can take the course at: www.speakyourlanguages.com/training. ReadyGo and ReadyGo Web Course Builder are trademarks of ReadyGo, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
The training course on how to work with a foreign-language interpreter was enthusiastically received. The course dramatically improved peoples’ ability to work with interpreters and enabled them to overcome their fear of communicating with non-English speakers. But as a live training course, it was difficult to schedule and difficult to provide enough training classes. David Cotlove, a consultant who had worked on developing the course, realized that for the course to be made more widely available, both within and outside of the school district, an on-line version would be required.
Dave started by using the web to research e-Learning authoring tools. When he came across ReadyGo Web Course Builder, he immediately connected with ReadyGo’s conclusion that course creators using WYSIWYG tools spend an excessive amount of time developing the look-and-feel of a course, not creating the content. He liked ReadyGo’s concept of focusing on course content by separating out the look-and-feel from inputtingcourse content. He then took ReadyGo’s Instructional Design course (/isd). He liked ReadyGo’s practical and straightforward approach. Cotlove says, “I purchased the ReadyGo WCB and found the tool very easy to use. The learning curve was short. It was easy to enter content, see how it looked in a web browser and make changes. The tool was flexible enough to accommodate our specific needs such as linking to videos. I only needed to contact ReadyGo Support once regarding a very minor problem and their response was immediate and very helpful.”
