At Slang, we are constantly conducting research on the best practices in language teaching and the e-learning industry to bring you the most efficient and engaging learning experience. This means we need to update our methodology and curriculum accordingly from time to time.
Our goal was to ensure that each of our courses remained a meaningful credential for you as a professional English learner, representing a significant amount of English knowledge of which you can be rightfully proud! However, we also wanted our courses to be succinct enough that they could be completed in a reasonable timeframe by a busy working professional.
After analyzing our course data in comparison to these industry standards and best practices, we realized that achieving those two goals would require us to adapt our offering to be more modular and focused on specific topics
Now, instead of one giant course covering a large number of topics (for example: Accounting), we will offer a group of related courses covering the main topics in each field in a focused and structured way (for example: Accounting Fundamentals, Managerial Accounting, Financial Accounting). Each of these smaller courses will take about 30 to 50 hours to complete, depending on the individual learner. We believe this new course structure will make your learning process faster and more efficient.
These course changes can be divided up into the following categories:
Category 1: Content updates
We continually review our course material to make sure that is both high-quality for learning and up-to-date with changes in the professional field. As new technologies and practices are introduced, we want to make sure that you can learn about them in our app! Or on the flip side, it might be the case that certain tasks which used to be relevant within a certain career field are now more commonly carried out by a different job function. We decided to take the opportunity of the course restructuring to introduce these types of small updates into a number of courses (list below), to make sure you’re learning efficiently with real-world content from your field.
- Travel
- Hiring
- Applying for Jobs
- Aerospace Engineering
- Automotive Engineering
- Mechanical Engineering
- Industrial Engineering
- Logistics
- Supply Chain
- Negotiation
- Investment Banking
- Sales
- Medical Tourism
- Computer Science
- Nursing
- Medical
- Manufacturing
- Operations
- English for Students
Category 2: Name Changes
In a small number of cases, we felt that the course name wasn’t providing the most accurate reflection of the content contained within the course. We changed the names to something else which we believe is clearer for learners. If you were studying the old course, you can simply continue studying it with the new name.
- Politics -> Political Science
- Computer Engineering -> Computer Engineering Fundamentals
Category 3: Significant Restructuring
This category contains the courses with the most extensive changes. These courses were primarily targeted for restructuring because they were quite extensive in scope and took a correspondingly long time to complete. In each case, we’ve introduced a new set of more modular courses covering all the same content that was in the original course. The old courses will be retired so that you can no longer study them, but all your progress in Slang will automatically be transferred to the new replacement courses so you don’t have to backtrack or repeat anything you’ve learned. You can read more about our progress system – here.
| If you had been studying… | You’ll now be assigned… |
| Human Resources | Employment Policies Training and Development Recruiting |
| Finance | Corporate Finance |
| Project Management | Project Initiation and Planning Project Execution and Management |
| Engineering Fundamentals | Engineering Foundations Engineering Math |
| Accounting | Accounting Fundamentals Financial Accounting Managerial Accounting |
| Psychology | Introductory Psychology Applied Psychology Psychological Research |
| Data Science | Data Science Foundations Data Management and Visualization |
| Computer Science | Computer Science Fundamentals Scientific Computing Artificial Intelligence |
| Software Engineering | Software Engineering Fundamentals Software Development |
| Business English | Professional Slang Terms Business Communications |
| Management | Corporate Finance Marketing Performance Management |
| Entrepreneurship | Entrepreneurship Fundamental sSaaS Startup Management |
Category 4
We’ve also taken the opportunity to introduce a few new courses that complement our existing offering. These new topics help to round out the selection of material for the Human Resources and Engineering/Technology industries.
- Employee Inclusion and Wellbeing
- Chemistry
- Business Analytics
Category 4
We’ve also introduced a new levelled system for achieving conversational fluency in English alongside your studies of technical and career-specific English. You can read more about this General English system in a separate post.
What this means for you
When you log into the app following the restructuring, you’ll see a few new features that will make it much easier to track the courses you’re studying. For example, we’ve introduced a handy new dropdown to switch between the courses you’ve been assigned by your organization, and a progress page where you can see how much time you’ve spent studying each of those courses.
Image: Switching between assigned courses
Most importantly of all, the course reassignments will take place automatically. For example, in the case of Accounting mentioned earlier, if you had been assigned to study the Accounting course previously, you will see that you’re now assigned to study Accounting Fundamentals, Managerial Accounting, and Financial Accounting.
You’ll also see that you have made some progress in each of those new courses according to the specific content you had studied previously. You can pick up right where you left off, just in a more structured way.
Check out the new courses and let us know what you think!
