busuu.com is a language learning site with a difference. While questions and exercises are apparently authored by site employees, grading and feedback are performed by other participants in the language learning. So, I a Spanish learner might respond to a question or invitation to introduce myself in Spanish. I type out and/or speak an answer. Then I am given an opportunity to select names of other participants whom I don’t know to grade or give feedback on my response. I assume other people are invited the same way I was by e-mail to perform the evaluation. Native Spanish speakers have the opportunity to rate my response on a five-star system and give feedback on the written and/or spoken response. They can copy my response and modify it so that it is more correct or in some cases just more idiomatic. On the spoken passages, an evaluator could say the passage over again in a way that he or she believed was more appropriate.
This frees the site staff from the time-consuming task of grading or evaluating and giving feedback. In addition it gives the language learners the opportunity for multiple feedbacks on what they did. The learners can see and hear a variety of solutions to the language challenges.
Also, there is a provision to hold conversations with native speakers over the Internet. Finally, you can “friend” and send rewards to other users.
This is not only an interesting approach for language learning but I can see it being used in many other types of learning. For example in sales or management training, instead of pretending there is one right answer, learners could receive feedback from experienced subject matter experts and also people that might correspond more closely to the sales customers or managed employees. I have heard of online writing groups that do the same type of activities in posting and commenting on each other’s stories and articles.
busuu.com takes advantage of the interactive web’s ability to bring together large number of users from different backgrounds, in this case, in languages to assist each other in learning.