Are you and your team making the most of the CL-150 Platform? Is there anything new you missed? Let’s look back on a few of the notable updates from 2019.

Platform Updates

The CL-150 Platform expands and improves every year based on what you need. This year, we addressed major points for all users, including program managers, instructors, and learners:

• Program managers and instructors can now set up recurring reports and receive them directly in their inbox every day, week, or month right on cue. No more setting up the same report over and over! Also new in Reporting is the Learner Activity Report, a detailed report about how an individual learner is spending time in the platform. The Program Manager Report has been improved as well – it now organizes users by Reporting Group, making it much easier to read reports run on a Parent Group.
• Lesson authors can now preview a lesson as students will see it before publishing. No more rushing to edit a lesson after publishing! Also new in Lesson Authoring this year is the ability to import vocab items, edit the lesson text at any point in the lesson authoring process, and add text formatting to many activities.
• Learners can now edit their Learned Vocab to add words and phrases learned outside the Platform and refresh them alongside CL-150 vocabulary. Also new for learners is an improved notification system, which added browser notifications in addition to email and push notifications.

CL-150 Cohort Updates

The CL-150 Cohort Team managed 36 Cohort lesson streams (12 languages and dialects with 3 ILR levels each) and published more than 1,700 new Cohort lessons this year! But lessons aren’t the only thing new with Cohorts in 2019:

• Improved lesson metadata: To help learners and instructors better identify what’s covered in each lesson, new lesson names now include the domain (such as ‘politics’ or ‘culture’) and lesson objectives more clearly define the linguistic, grammatical, and cultural concepts covered.
• Expanded activity flow: All Cohort lessons feature the same activity flow to ensure they meet length requirements and provide opportunities to practice different modalities. We’ve improved that flow by including the Slide Show activity (to provide historical or cultural context before reading the lesson text) and by requiring learners to answer multiple choice questions in Reading Comprehension and Listening Comprehension.
• Expanded lesson sources: Cohort lessons cover a range of professionally relevant domains (economy, security, culture, etc.) from authentic sources. This year, we’ve expanded the scope of those sources to include literature, a defining aspect of many cultures.

Transparent Language in the Community

In the past year, our team has travelled around the world conducting trainings for the CL-150 community, including:

• 29 orientations for program managers using CL-150 reporting tools to enforce language policies and requirements
• 118 orientations for sustainers using Cohorts and self-reporting to meet language policy requirements and maintain proficiency between periods of formal training
• 7 orientations for instructors/mentors using Lesson Authoring and class management tools to run in-person and virtual language classes

If you or your team are using the CL-150 Platform to manage your language program and you’re interested in an orientation for new members (or a refresher training!), submit a training request and let us know how we can help.

If there’s anything else we can help you with, please reach out. Addressing your questions, requests, and feedback is how the CL-150 Platform continues to grow and support all aspects of your language program. We look forward to working with you in 2020!