Sanako Connect
Critical Evaluation
Sanako's History, Sanako Connect and Market Analysis
A History of Language Teaching
Pain Points
and the Market
To understand Sanako Connect, you need to become familiar with Sanako - or as it was known many years ago Tandberg Educational. Tandberg Educational was founded in 1961 where it was building language laboratories. During the 1960s and 1970s, Tandberg grew and became the global leader in language labs. The educational division of the company was acquired by Teleste Corporation in 1984. In 2003, Sanako was born as a spin-off of Teleste. Sanako’s products and services include software and hardware-based digital language labs for classrooms, cloud-based solutions for virtual environments, flexible content integration and training modules as well as consultation. With more than 30,000 classroom installations in over 100 countries worldwide, Sanako solutions suit a variety of classroom and distance learning environments. In September 2017, Sanako partnered with Ed-Tech Startup, Eupheus Learning breaking in to the East Indian market with its language labs.
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Clearly, it has a long history with language education. But, it also has strong partnerships in the EedTech community. In 2020, Sanako partnered with Reactored, and their teams are working to incorporate more gamification, additional artificial intelligence and extended reality into their online learning platforms. Their team includes a cognitive science specialist, foreign language teachers and software Developers. I believe this speaks greatly to the abilities of the team and the company as a whole.
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Reactored is a self-paced multi-language learning platform powered by content from Sanako. While it can be done as a self-guiding course where students move through content with their preferred learning style, it is most often used in blended learning classrooms. Here, teachers deploy modules and allow students to move at their own pace. This frees the teacher to help students who require more support. Reactored is gamified and automatically grades work, reducing the workload on teachers
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While Sanako as a company certainly has potential, I believe Sanako Connect is the next major growth product for them. It involves providing an online LMS for language learning in the form of an entire digital classroom.
Without a doubt, probably the most compelling argument (Pain Point) for the investment involves the pandemic. Covid-19 has forced online learning upon institutions across the world. And while there is a desire to return to ‘normality’, the advantages of the ubiquity and convenience of online learning cannot be tossed away. Travel restrictions are still an issue. Markets otherwise inaccessible previously now have audiences/customers/learners that are eager to take on language learning. Post-secondary education in North America/Canada allows pathways to immigration for students, and usually a prerequisite of this is English language ability.
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Post-secondary institutions are offering courses to students across the world. While the preference is for them to attend in person, accommodations are being made to accept them online. The default mode for this hybrid education is Zoom and existing LMSs (like Canvas, Blackboard, and other available systems). Zoom is easy to use, but not always the best choice for education. While PitchBook’s company profile of Sanako lists 5 major competitors (Busuu, Cambly, Lingoda, Voxy and Duolingo), LMSs pose the largest entrenched obstacle. Institutions/school boards/companies have paid large amounts for them and are unlikely to replace them with ‘something similar’.
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This means that the customers for Sanako Connect are the training/language learning departments within these institutions that can secure that funding from their institution for this platform. Their task would be twofold:
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convince their superiors that Sanako Connect is so superior to the LMS in terms of language training, that it is worth the additional cost (for something that executives could easily view as redundant)
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be willing to work across 2 platforms: Sanako Connect and the company LMS.
The differentiation offered by Sanako Connect over other LMSs is that its focus is on language. It offers instructors/trainers and students a variety of ways to present and evaluate language learning which allows them to overcome the shortcoming of traditional LMSs. Sanako Connect offers language teachers a solution to a problem that general LMSs cannot address: targeted language issues.
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LMSs often serve as simple dumping grounds for files and information, as well as dropboxes for assignments and online tests. And in these formats, students are generally allowed to submit document files or write online tests. Ironically, the built-in spell checkers end up masking poor student spelling - a common issue with language learners. Whereas robust LMSs will allow students to submit assignments in a variety of formats (doc. jpg , mp3, etc.), providing feedback to all these formats can be problematic. Some LMSs will allow instructors to mark-up and leave comments on essays in the same way that a Word document or Google Docs could.
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However, with language production, marking up an audio file in a manner that will specifically show where students have made mistakes at specific times is typically not possible without additional software separate from the LMS (not to mention the issues of training instructors on new programs). The very few actually offer specific language learning support or the ability to submit orally.
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And this is where Sanako shines!
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As a language LMS, Sanako can do things other LMSs cannot!
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It not only functions as an standalone LMS, it works just as well in hybrid learning situations: both synchronously and asynchronously.
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It creates individual classrooms for instructors to teach in
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It allows both oral and text-based submissions.
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It allows oral practice so students can listen to a Master Track recorded by a teacher, and then practice with the Master Track directly above their own recordings.
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Students can then replay their own audio while listening to the Master Track and choose to re-record if they are unsatisfied with their initial submissions
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Instructors can mark this audio work directly on Sanako Connect, specifically highlighting and commenting ( either with oral comments or written comments) at the specific time frames where the students make mistakes
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It allows the combination of audio, still image, video and text all in one exercise if necessary
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It also acts as a virtual classroom we're teachers no longer need to rely on Zoom as it incorporates most of its features (with the exception of video conferencing - only audio is shared)
