Southside Baptist Church is located in Jacksonville, FL. Its mission is to provide quality English as a Second Language (ESL) and Citizenship instruction to adult immigrants, refugees, foreign spouses, and foreign workers from diverse geographic and language backgrounds. Their ESL classes use the Cambridge Ventures curriculum and include reading, writing, speaking, and listening practice. They are available for beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels. Citizenship classes use USCIS study materials and include the 100 civics questions, as well as practice interviews.
What challenges did Southside Baptist Church face?
Due to COVID-19, Southside Baptist Church needed to adapt their once-a-week evening in-person classes to a completely online format. They were looking for a solution that could:
- Provide a live synchronous video interactive component and an asynchronous class content site.
- Allow live video classes that cover all aspects included in the ESL curriculum – reading, writing, speaking, and listening – in an online format.
- Provide interactive features for quality online teaching.
- Be easy to navigate and does not require any complex registration/installation.
After watching a demo video of an ESL lesson in VEDAMO Virtual Classroom, the Southside Baptist Church teaching team chose the platform because of its interactive features, which cover all requirements of language teaching.
What are the key benefits for Southside Baptist Church from using VEDAMO Virtual Classroom?
VEDAMO allowed Southside Baptist Church’s program to successfully move online in the fall of 2020 as the platform:
- Combines tools for conducting highly interactive live online sessions with a learning management system for content and user administration.
- Provides features that ensure high-quality language training and meet all the requirements of the Cambridge Ventures curriculum.
- Ensures both online instructor-led and self-paced learning.
- Allows learners to quickly and easily join the online classes and study English or Citizenship from anywhere and on any device (computer/tablet/smartphone).
