We have released our first-ever e-learning course, part of a new, interactive e-learning portal that we will continue to expand in the coming months. We will eventually link directly to the portal from the site, but for now, you can access it here for a free excerpt, or to register for the first full module, focused on Spain.
Make sure you are currently logged into GuildSomm, then go to the new e-learning site. From the "Log in" button at the top right-hand corner, you can log into the portal with your existing GuildSomm account.
Test out the content with a free excerpt of the Spain module, or register for the full course for a course fee of $35, which will help us build new modules. Payment is currently proceeded via PayPal, but you can pay with a credit card and it does not require a PayPal account.
Please let us know your feedback as we are planning many more of these courses!
Find the new content here: https://elearn.guildsomm.com
Just put a little time into the free excerpt, and if I may make a couple suggestions;
The quizzes are a little clunky. Missing a single letter when needing to spell out a foreign word for the "fill in the blank" type questions, just slows down the whole process. Other testing apps and websites offer multiple spellings as acceptable answers, I suggest you try to implement the same.If you are offering new nouns, such as varietals, try to include a phonetic spelling. Through my studies over the years, my biggest fear and hang up is hoping I say a word correctly, and not look like a fool. If I was a first time learner, not fluent in latin language, "Rias Biaxas" would not only be difficult to spell, but pronunciation would almost be guaranteed incorrect.
These are my only two gripes for the moment. Feel free to delete this comment, just trying to help ;)
Just taking it. I need the pronunciation and I felt the same need on spelling for fill in blank. Would be cumbersome to have to keep trying to spell to see the correct answer. Instead if spelled incorrectly have it recommend the correct spelling once accepting the answer. I love that you are offering these for different types of learning/learners.
agree on the phonetic spelling... but not on making it easier. Learning the correct spelling of foreign words should be part of our training. In my personal experience - in both courses I took on Italian wines (Italian Wine Specialist and Italian Wine Ambassador) spelling errors were counted as negative and influenced the final score... and I support this. I get corrected all the times when I butcher an English word or name (my first language is Italian) and this should apply also to English speaking people. So... making it difficult should motivate people to really pay attention to the spelling. My 2 cents on this.
We have thus far made a conscious decision for pronunciations to be from a single native language speaker. Obviously regional dialects can be quite different and I’m sure somebody in Barcelona would roll their eyes at the way someone in Madrid pronounces their region. The same is of course true of how a sommelier in Rome pronounces a term from Sardinia. It would be great to have each region spoken in local dialect, but we decided not to try to do this unless we get to a point where we can be consistent in this approach. Not saying it’s not a noble goal, but it’s not in our current bandwidth.
Americans don't usually learn IPA unfortunately but new audio would be great as "plah de bah-heys" is killing me.
Yes, I have e-mailed in about that sole concern regarding Spain. I would love to have those updated/and can provide the IPA spelling notations if need be. That being said, this would be a very helpful resource for many of us.