Exactly one year ago in the middle of the Covid pandemic as life as we knew it seemed to have come to an end we at LTL launched Flexi Classes.
All LTL schools had been closed due to Covid in early 2020 and the language learning world was not in good shape. We knew people wanted to study in group classes and realized that the only way to be able to offer professional teachers while keeping costs reasonable was to have students studying together in small groups.
We tried and quickly learned two things:
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Online Small Group Classes work: As long as the teacher was good and the course well structured, the language progress we achieved with small online group classes was pretty much the same as with face to face classes. This was quite an amazing discovery for us.
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Fixed Time Online group classes are a logistical nightmare. People having different schedules, needing to cancel, living in different time zones, some students wanting to study for several months, others just for a few weeks, some progressing very quickly, others needing more time etc.
We spent more time trying to organize those groups than actually teaching them.
So we realized this works, but we need a new way of scheduling group class times. The original inspiration for Flexi Classes came from how we saw Yoga and fitness classes were organized in Shanghai. Group classes, but flexible, with the option to follow a program, but also being able to cancel, take a break and adjust schedules when needed.
That’s what lead to Flexi Classes. We then turned into a “Start Up”, which is a VERY different way of operating to running a language school and developed the concept. On October 10th 2021 we finally launched Flexi Classes, with the first classes taught on October 12th.
Back then with only one language (Mandarin) and two levels (Intro and HSK 1).
I remember how nervous I was and wondered if anyone would ever sign up for a class - and if they did, would they like it?
It turned out a huge success. We got loads of incredibly great feedback and its been an amazing ride. We expanded to new languages, added levels, expended our teaching team, became very professional at building teaching materials, made plenty of mistakes, spent a lot of time learning from them and in the end really came up with what is really an amazing way of learning languages.
We have taken complete beginners from 0 to HSK 5 in half a year, we have helped working people to study with real teachers and in groups, who otherwise never could have done that and had a lot of fun and made a lot of friends along the way.
Today we teach Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Shanghainese. We will add Russian, Cantonese and Taiwanese (Hokkien) within this year.
We offer about 600 small online group classes per day.
So this is a big thank you to the team, to our students and our teachers. You are guys and girls are amazing, made all of this possible and filled this dark Covid time with light.
Thank You!
If you enjoy Flexi Classes and want to share it, we are offering a 25% discount for new students on their first month subscription with the promo code: FLEXIVERSARY or you can write about us on Google Maps
And here a few pics of the people behind all of this
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