Irish cloud firm in €3.7m deal to teach English to 1m people across China

13 Jan 2014

Onwards Learning has signed a commercial deal worth €3.75m with China Computer Correspondence College to roll out its LearnOnEnglish.com cloud to 400 vocational colleges across China.

China Computer Correspondence College (CCCC) will promote LearnOnEnglish.com (LOE) as an internet portal within its own websites to 1m students in China.

The LOE platform, which makes language learning resources available as web-apps, is currently rolling out as an online portal service via a series of large scale organisations in China in earlier deals valued at €4.4m.

These include the CVAE, the Ministry of Education’s vocational training and skills arm, and CERNET, the national educational network backbone. LearnOnEnglish.com is also scheduled to go live to communities of language learners via co-marketing agreements with various colleges and universities, professional bodies and agencies, and government organisations in China.

“LearnOnEnglish.com is an open platform founded on the best practices in social networking and collaborative studying to help our subscribers achieve their language learning goals,” Carlo Crighton, the co-founder of Onwards Learning Ltd.

“This long term agreement with CCCC’s college network is indicative of the potential that exists for our language learning web-app ecosystem. CCCC understand and share in our vision to make the best resources in language learning available to everyone in a single online location,” Crighton said.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com