One of the things we are going to be looking at here at eLanguages.info is how people learn best online, and what people seem to enjoy the most. There have been some pretty big failures in online language learning, most notably the folks over at Parlo - who if I recall correctly had some pretty impressive dot.com capital behind them when they launched. Now they are probably lucky to get 3000 unique visitors a day - Alexa has them ranked at 207,200. Not bad if you are a small web entrepeneur like me, but pretty awful if you aimed to be a serious portal 5 years ago. They've also scrapped their formerly aggressive affiliate program, telling me that Parlo is in the tank.

I am not sure exactly how they were/are structured - probably worth taking a look at. Some might say that language learning just hasn't come into its own online - but I have 4500 ezine subscribers to my weekly Spanish teaching newsletter who I think would say differently. It seems that a combination of guided study and self tutoring works best - but I wonder if perhaps you could ramp it up a bit by requiring homework, etc. Not necessarily as structured as a class, but not as loose as an ezine you can take or leave each week.

We'll be looking at what programs are the most effective, in order to build our own offerings with these lessons in mind. A friend of mine in Atlanta named Ricardo Gonzalez has a company called Bilingual America, and he swears by phone tutoring as the single most effective way to teach a foreign language. I'll be putting up a poll shortly so that visitors can have a chance to give us some feedback. If you have any thoughts, give us a shout via the comments bar. Sorry the site is still so empty, but with the holidays and all it's hard to find time to put up all the content!