Wishing you all a very happy new year! We think it’s going to be a pretty exciting one for SSi.
Here’s what’s coming down the tracks:
Updated courses: we’re going to be updating all our paid-for courses (starting with Mandarin) and also adding Arabic - using the latest work that we’ve done after our direct in-the-field experiences with Japanese and Irish last year - I’m feeling very upbeat about the quality of the latest versions, and I can’t wait for us to release all the updates. I’ll keep you posted on what the timeline looks like - fingers crossed for Mandarin in January, and then we’ll see how it goes.
New courses: Tom’s been updating the Popty (our course creation tool) to be able to let us give people accounts so that they can build, edit and record courses - ranging from quick builds with AI support where there are suitable LLMs all the way through to building by hand where there aren’t any LLMs. We’re going to start testing this inside the next few months, beginning with languages where there are strong LLMs - and the key point here is that all courses built by volunteers will be published as free at point of access.
We’ve got a new design for the current app which we’re expecting by the end of January - we’re also going to be refactoring how our onboarding and weekly support email approaches work, which I think is going to be helpful.
Then the biggest thing for us is going to be either a) adding a schools interface to the existing app or b) publishing a new app with an inbuilt schools interface. I favour b) because it would also let us go with a new approach to listening work which I think is going to make a massive difference (I’m very keen to get my hands on it for Irish!) - but it will depend a bit on how our in-house and out-sourced tech dev tracks line up.
When we have the schools interface available, we’re going to be able to follow up on existing conversations with Irish and Breton governments about school pilots, which could be a tipping point.
We’re also kicking off the year with some new marketing tests - it feels as though we’re closer than ever before to having a sustainable and successful marketing approach, which could be a real game-changer for the entire project.
One way or another - whether it’s word of mouth for free courses, successful schools contracts, or successful marketing for our paid-for courses - it looks reasonable to hope that we’re going to be able to accelerate in 2026 - and finally start to put some serious extra resources into our Welsh provision as well (including a LOT of new content to replace and extend the old Level 3) 