About Us
Open English Basics
Open English is an online school created to reinvent the English language learning experience. The company serves a large and rapidly growing global market, initially targeting Spanish speakers in the Americas. Through live instruction with native English speaking teachers and multi-media learning content, all provided over the internet, Open English empowers students on their customized path to English fluency.
Open English was originally founded in 2006, and its companies, with offices in Miami, Caracas, Bogotá, and Panamá, combine the best of US corporate governance practices with efficient Latin American operations and deep knowledge of the Spanish-speaking consumer/student.
Our Online School
The company offers a revolutionary new approach to English language learning which combines live instruction with native English speaking teachers and multi-media learning content customized to each learner. Its students study from home or office and avoid inconvenient scheduling, long commute times, high tuition costs, and outdated books and CD-ROMs.
Take a tour
Among the features of the online school:
- Live Sessions: Native English speaking teachers instruct students in real time through virtual classrooms, sharing learning materials on their computer screens. Classes start every hour and are limited to 5 students per teacher. These live sessions focus on pronunciation, vocabulary and English conversation. This high-touch feature is a marked contrast to passive systems like CD-ROMs, books and tapes.
- Study Advisors: Study Advisors are similar to personal trainers at the gym: they are responsible for motivating and guiding students through the 12 month learning program to ensure they reach fluency. They make sure students are working online, on their own and at their own pace. The student and his Study Advisor communicate with each other for the entirety of the 12 month program via telephone, emails, and video screencasts which illustrate the student's progress.
- Personalized Interactive Content: The online school includes access to hundreds of interactive lessons, videos, podcasts and worksheets. After evaluating each individual, the platform personalizes and recommends a curriculum tailored to the needs of each student.
- Progress Tracking & Fluency Calculator: The Fluency Calculator estimates the date when a student will reach fluency based on the amount of time he is willing to study each week. The learning platform keeps track of each student's goals, weekly progress, cumulative progress and latest activity. The fluency calculator is constantly updated so students know where they stand --an important feature for a 12 month course.
- Academic Checkpoints: Teachers conduct a total of six checkpoints throughout the duration of the course to ensure that each student is progressing.
Open English History
In 2005, Andrés Moreno left his offline English language training company and teamed up with Universidad Simon Bolivar (USB) university classmate and friend Wilmer Sarmiento to begin planning an on-line English Language School.
The following year they were joined by Kenny Vivas and Ciro Durán, also former classmates from USB. The team set up shop in Moreno’s apartment and began programming what would eventually become OpenEnglish.com.
Early names for the learning platform included English180 and Thinkglish!, but in 2008 the name Open English was adopted. Programming work continued during 2007 and 2008, in parallel with the development of the company’s proprietary multimedia content, including English Highway, a 60 episode television series co-produced with the Cisneros Groups’ cable TV channel Cl@se.
Open English was launched commercially in Venezuela in December of 2008 with advertising on the cable channel Venevisión Plus. After 18 months of successful growth in the Venezuelan market, the site was opened to the rest of the world in 2010.