How COVID-19 Quarantine Strongly Enhances Elearning Localization Opportunities

Nowadays, there are many elearning platforms offering online courses either paid or for free. These courses may be provided by well-known universities or by people who are experts in a topic. For students, they need professional curriculums if they’re going to study from home.
As a public health emergency, COVID-19 forces people to quarantine themselves to stay safe. Schools and universities are shutting down and shifting to online learning. This pandemic may trigger a boom in online education and study from home.
Whether it’s video streaming, virtual classes, online courses or any other form of elearning solutions, the world is now shifting to online education.
Such a pandemic may have benefits on elearning industry, which in result will benefit the elearing localization industry as well.
 

Online Education Case Study - China

180 million Chinese students of primary, secondary and tertiary schools are staying home. The spring semester in China was scheduled to begin on February 17, but due to the pandemic, it has been postponed. Thus, Chinese schools and universities are switching to online education on a massive scale.
A great number of Chinese higher education students are registered in Australian universities, but in response to the pandemic, the Australian government has restricted travels from China.
As a result, Australian higher education institutions are working on enhancing their online capacity to deliver courses to their students properly. And while all universities are using online learning management systems (LMS) and virtual classes’ technology, there are no specific standards for online education.
This could somehow cause an issue since some students are not familiar with online or blended learning. Thus, students should online and get some tips and instructions on how could they benefit the most.
During the SARS pandemic, China had to find out some replacing forms of distance education. This made students more deeply familiar with online tools, at least temporarily.
The current situation of global online education suggests COVID-19 may result in more exposure in regions with enough resources, connectivity, and infrastructure. However, it is also more likely to result in chronic deficiencies in less prepared countries.
  

Working From Home and Training Opportunities

Although the education market is very large, these emerging opportunities for elearning are not exclusive to this exact market. Corporates too are shifting their systems to work from home, which means that meetings and training will be held via online tools.
The training and courses that any corporate has to offer to their employees or clients would now be shifted to elearning materials accessible for whoever needs it on the spot.
 

Most Important Elearning Trends in 2020

1. Gamification
2. Personalization of Learning
3. Social Learning
4. Mobile Learning
5. Microlearning
6. Focus on Soft Skills
7. Digitization of Instructor-Led Training (ILT)
8. Data-Driven Practices
9. Videos

17 Best Online Free Elearning Platforms

There are many elearning platforms that provide online free materials as an initiative to help the world pass the pandemic, such as Coursera, which is providing free access to over 3,800 courses and 400 specializations from leading universities and companies. Udemy also provided some free courses but was limited for 24 hours.
Best online free elearning platforms include:

1. Coursera
2. Khan Academy
3. Open Culture Online Courses
4. Udemy
5. Academic Earth
6. edX
7. Alison
8. iTunesU Free Courses
9. Stanford Online
10. Harvard Extension
11. Open Yale Courses
12. UC Berkeley Class Central
13. MIT OpenCourseWare
14. Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
15. Codecademy
16. University of London Podcasts
17. University of Oxford Podcasts

Elearning Localization Services

Our elearning localization process consists of:

- CONTENT ADAPTATION
We recreate and adapt the content to match different market needs, cultural aspects and context to provide learners with a localized experience by using native subject matter experts. We take culturally appropriate colors, symbols, and clothing into consideration.

- TRANSLATION
Content is adaptively translated by our subject matter experts.  It’s our well-balanced equation that will get the work done efficiently!

- QUALITY
Right after the translation process, the translated material gets proof-read, prepared and tested. Our Quality Assurance process includes checking for any linguistic or functional mistakes and testing it using our in-house created tools.
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- MULTIMEDIA
Whether you’re aiming at using voice-over or subtitling, Saudisoft is able to portray your messages clearly. Professional native voice over artists is carefully chosen to match your preferences.
If you prefer adding subtitles to the narration of your course, we have expert subtitling engineers who are able to convert all your content into subtitles considering time-coding and closed captions for hard-hearing audiences.
 
- ENGINEERING & LAYOUT
Our engineers integrate your translated content, audio voice over and video into the course and ensure that it functions seamlessly. We offer Desktop Publishing services for images and documents such as quizzes. Before your content goes live, our testing phase ensures that it’s error-free and ready for publishing. We work with the latest authoring tools, such as Lectora Inspire & Articulate Storyline, and support eLearning formats such as HTML 5, Scorm, xAPI, HTML5, AICC, and cmi5, in order to publish your course directly to your Learning Management System (LMS) in just a few clicks. We can also integrate your flash course into HTML 5. Whether you are teaching people soft skills, technical skills or educational content, Saudisoft has helped many international clients translate and localize their Computer Based Training or eLearning materials into different languages. We have served clients in many sectors including Automotive, Oil and Gas, Government, Education, Finance, Healthcare and IT.