Engoo 2021 in Review | Engoo Tutor's Blog

Table of Contents

2021 was a difficult year. So here's to giving ourselves a pat on the back and reflecting on some of the positives:

Holiday Parties
Most Popular Lesson Materials
New Lesson Room Features
Typhoon Odette Fundraiser
News From Our Students

🥳 Holiday Parties

To bring some cheer to our community, we decided to get festive last year with holiday-themed emojis, virtual backgrounds, and even worldwide holiday events!

We were blown away by your responses to our Halloween and holiday-themed workspace decoration contests! Congrats again to all the winners! Here were our favorites:

And here were students' favorites:

Fun fact: Tutor Billy, the 1st place winner in the "most liked" category, is dressed as one of the main characters in the animated series Demon Slayer. This series has been all the rage in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan the past few years, so it might make for some good conversation starters!

🗞️ 2021 in Engoo Lesson Materials

Did you know that in 2021, around 40% of lessons were done with Daily News? Here were the 10 most popular articles last year.

After Daily News, our next most popular category was Conversation, which was booked about 12% of the time. This was followed by Conversation Topics, English for Kids, Grammar, Describing Pictures, and Business.

We're also happy to announce that we revamped our Discussion lessons and released new materials in other languages! These include the third and final part of our Master Korean materials as well as a brand new course for learning Chinese. Chinese is our most popular language after English, so we partnered with a publisher in Taiwan to release this Chinese textbook for beginners.

🧑‍🏫 New Lesson Room Features

We made a lot of upgrades to our lesson room this year, including new whiteboard tools, dictionary sync'ing, and virtual backgrounds.

Speaking of virtual backgrounds, we released our first animated backgrounds during the holidays. This was our cozy Christmas background. Can you spot all the animations?

We hope you enjoy the new lesson room features, and as always, if you have any feedback on the materials or lesson page features, please don't hesitate to let us know through Tutor Support.

🫂 Typhoon Odette Fundraiser

On a more somber note, our heart goes out to our staff and tutors in the Philippines who were affected by Typhoon Odette. We've heard a lot about the devastation from those of you in the affected regions, and we sincerely hope life can go back to normal soon.

A huge thank you to all tutors who had lessons on December 23rd and 24th in support of our fundraising campaign! Thanks to your enthusiasm, we were able to raise PHP 546,350 ($10,921) for the Philippine Red Cross.

🧑‍🎓 News from Our Students

2021 was also a big year for many of our students. For instance, Tomoki Matsuno – a student who took lessons with us during his middle school years – got into Harvard University! He started his undergraduate studies last fall and intends on majoring in Government.

a photo of Tomoki Matsuno at an international conference

During his time with us, he often booked free-talk lessons and came prepared with lots of topics he wanted to discuss. He particularly enjoyed talking about airplanes with tutors who also worked as airplane mechanics. (So remember to include any special skills or experiences in your profile!)

In other news, more students have also been joining us from Turkey and Spain these days, so look out for them!

👋 That’s It For Now!

We hope you enjoyed looking back on our past year together. If you haven't already, now may also be a good time to reflect on how the past year went for you too. What were the ups and downs? What went well? What could have been better? And what are your wishes and resolutions for 2022?

Here's to a peaceful and prosperous new year to all Engoo tutors! 🥂✨