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English online

Top 3 facts

  1. The site now has over 129,000 registered users!
  2. The site saw 15m + unique visitors in 2010
  3. The site was referenced in a speech by Gordon Brown in his trip to China

British Council Twitter Feed

A 120,000 strong community of English Language Teachers and Learners to help promote the learning of English in China

The English Online web site was commissioned by the British Council to encourage the learning of English in China.

The brief was to design and build a web site/social network to promote the learning of English in China using a number of social networking features to connect a community of (what is at the time of writing) over 120,000 users. We developed the site over a number of months, working closely with the British Council team (and luckily for us later with Lullabot) to create a dynamic and innovative website, that could be accessed on multiple devices including mobile browsers.

With detailed user profiles, multiple roles, user blogs, commenting and a range of social features the community grew rapidly from launch to over 120,000 registered members. The web site also allowed the British Council to showcase their wide range of resources via video, audio and image galleries, podcasts, downloads, a widget and much more. It is also fully available in English, Chinese (Simplified) and Chinese (Traditional).

Special thanks to: Andy and Ian from the British Council, Lullabot and I.T United for their work in making this project a huge social networking success.

Weblink: www.englishonline.org.cn

Key features include:

Personalised Profiles

Each user is able to keep track of their content and online status through customised profiles which include blog posts, message walls, buddy lists and general information.

When registering, you are encouraged to fill in as much detail about yourself as possible, such as learning interests, reasons for studying English and completed exams. This will enable content to match your profile, giving the user customised content, suited to their learning needs.

Listen and Watch

There is a wide option of both audio and video content throughout the site, the Listen and Watch section offers further episodes, tutorials and documentaries.

Videos are available to embed throughout the web and audio tutorials are commonly used alongside written exercises.

For example, view the An Introduction to UK food video series.

Discussion boards

The discussion board is a forum of topics which members can exchange information on English language techniques, exam advice and general user discussions.

Being updated daily with up-to-date news discussion, it encourages debate in the English language and creates interest groups between users.

We have worked with BrightLemon since the end of 2007 when we commissioned them on a 1/2m GBP project for the British Council called English Online.

Our site was built in Drupal an open source CMS and BrightLemon led the development of a site which contained multilingual capacity as well as an in depth registration and customer relationship management system as a foundation for our community driven website for English learners across mainland China and Hong Kong.

In order to enhance our relationship management with our users BrightLemon also developed a widget using Adobe AIR as well as a mobile website to cater for the growing number of users accessing the mobile web. All of this has contributed to over 50,000 members in our first year since launch. We have continued to use BrightLemon in order to enhance our offer as well as assist the project in developing our social media functionalities.

Andrew Newton, British Council Hong Kong

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