Teaching English online: what the platform takes off your hands

English is the most crowded subject there is, and it has more tools built for it than any other language. That is exactly the problem: there are many of them, and they are all separate. The verb table in a bookmark, the word trainer in an app, the pronunciation check on someone else’s site, the video in a fourth tab — and you open all of it in front of the student while they wait.

Here is what you do not have to open separately, because it is already inside the lesson.

The irregular verbs are inside the lesson

The reference opens right in the lesson room, next to the student’s vocabulary: 163 verbs, three forms, a translation and a search box. A student who has forgotten the second form doesn’t go off to search for it — they open the panel and find the verb with all three forms. You don’t lose sight of them while it happens.

A small thing that matters: variant forms are not hidden. burn carries both — burnt and burned — so the British-versus-American conversation happens right there, instead of «I’ll send you a link later».

Gap-fills that check themselves

A gap-fill is not one exercise type but three ways of answering the same question: drag the word from a bank, type it in, or pick it from a list. For A1 those are three different difficulties, and you can switch between them without rewriting the text.

• One gap can have several correct answers — both «has got» and «has» count
• There is a «free field»: a gap with no correct answer, where the student writes whatever they like and you read it when reviewing
• Every cell has its own budget of attempts, and after a wrong one the student sees exactly which gap it was

A typed answer forgives small things by default: a stray full stop or a missing apostrophe doesn’t turn a right answer into a wrong one. If that matters for your class, strict matching is a switch away.

«Not stated» — a third verdict in true/false

The true/false exercise can carry a third verdict: «not stated». That isn’t decoration — it is exactly how the reading tasks in IELTS and TOEFL are built, and teaching a student to tell «false» from «not stated» is a separate job that two buttons cannot do.

Pronunciation: two recognisers on one microphone

In a speaking exercise the student reads a phrase aloud, and two recognisers listen at once: one transcribes free speech onto the screen, the other compares what was said against the reference phoneme by phoneme and returns a verdict — accepted or not.

We count completeness ourselves rather than trusting the provider: if the reference is «put up with» and the student said «put up», the attempt doesn’t pass. That matters for English in particular — otherwise phrasal verbs sail through on half of themselves.

The audio doesn’t go straight to the provider but through our own server, so the recording stays inside our perimeter.

The student vocabulary runs on the Anki algorithm

A word highlighted in the lesson lands in the student’s own vocabulary with its translation. From there a trainer built on FSRS — the same spaced-repetition algorithm Anki uses — brings it back: the word returns when it is about to be forgotten, not on a «every Tuesday» schedule.

A card is not a word but a word in a direction. «Word → translation» trains recognition, «translation → word» trains recall, and those are two separate cards with separate progress. With English and its wide passive vocabulary, the difference shows up fast.

The accent is chosen at course level: American or British. A word remembers the language and accent it was added with, so a vocabulary built in a British class doesn’t suddenly start speaking American.

Video that asks questions

A clip goes in as a link from YouTube, RuTube, VK or Dzen and plays inside the task. There is a separate type — «interactive video»: you put pause points on the timeline, each one raises a question, and the video does not continue until the student answers. Watching with half an eye stops working.

The AI writes an exercise, not the lesson for you

The «Generate» button sits inside the editor of one particular exercise. You describe what you need — «five present perfect questions on this text» — and get a finished exercise of the type you are editing. You can attach a PDF or an image to the request: a handout from a coursebook becomes an interactive task without being retyped.

Worth knowing up front

• Words in the vocabulary carry no phonetic transcription (IPA) — they carry audio. If you work through sounds by symbol, the transcription has to go into the translation field by hand.
• In a speaking exercise the student sees an «accepted / not accepted» verdict rather than a score out of a hundred. The score is computed but not surfaced.
• In interactive video a pause point lets the student through on any submitted answer: you check correctness when reviewing, there is no automatic block on a wrong one.