The challenge
We are used to thinking that we have to be in a classroom with a teacher and grammar books to learn English. However, this type of material is made up of general content that is rarely adapted to the student’s interests, skills or career path. In the long run, this becomes a challenge for educational institutions when preparing their students for the job market.
Faced with this scenario, the Corporación Universitaria Unitec, an educational community with over 44 years of academic experience in Colombia, realized the need to complement their general English program. Their goal was to find a tool that would allow their students to practice the language in and out of the classroom, with content aligned to their professional profiles.
Unitec’s aim was to improve the professional and technical profile of its students and to increase the number of graduates with an advanced level of English. This objective is aligned with the institution’s mission, as it seeks to provide human-centered, comprehensive education to its students, so that they become competent, enterprising, creative professionals and technologists, with critical thinking skills, leadership capabilities, and high social responsibility.
The solution
Their search for the best English teaching complement started in 2019. It was in the same year that Unitec decided to collaborate with Slang to incorporate the use of our app in their English academic program, beginning in the first semester of 2020.
The decision to work with Slang was motivated by the platform’s ability to integrate with the technological and undergraduate academic programs of the institution’s four schools: Economics and Administrative Sciences, Arts and Communication Sciences, Engineering, and Legal and Human Sciences. This alliance works due to the wide range of courses offered by Slang, ranging from general English to different professional areas.
In addition, Slang had the capacity to offer courses to a larger population due to the fact that it adapts to both face-to-face and virtual modalities. As a result, more students were able to access the program without difficulties.
Moreover, the support of the Learner Experience and Customer Success teams was key to the successful integration of Slang as a complement to the English academic program at Unitec.
Building a program aligned with the institution’s goals
The Learner Experience team has worked closely with the university to align its goals with the platform’s general and professional English course offerings. In order to do so, Slang has contributed to the design of study goals and monthly assessments of the students’ progress.
Support strategies for the success of the program
Slang’s Customer Success team contributed to the program’s successful development through the training of administrators and teachers, periodic metrics monitoring, management of support cases, as well as the recommendation and implementation of best practices to fulfill the objectives.
The successful implementation of Slang at Unitec was achieved thanks to the variety of courses that respond to the needs of its students, such as:
The results
The alliance with Slang has allowed Unitec to meet its goal of improving the English proficiency of its students. Today, the university continues to use Slang’s platform and, after 2 years of continuous work, we have achieved these results:
“The platform is very instructive for teaching another language, and my progress has been reflected in these two years that I have been using Slang.”
Diego Gordillo
English V student
“The course catalog offered is quite broad and covers different approaches to teaching English as a foreign language, hence, as educators, we can make use of these resources to motivate our students and show them the importance of this language as a tool to have a competent profile in today’s job market.”
Jessica Mancera
Coordinadora de Idiomas – Unitec
With Slang, your students will have a variety of English language courses that cover both general and professional subjects, which will boost their careers and give them a more competitive profile in the job market. Contact us here.
