USA Learns: A Free Mobile-Friendly Distance Learning Option for ELLs

USA Learns is a free website that is approved for distance learning use and proxy hour collection in MN ABE. It has recently been overhauled and is now a mobile-optimized site, which means it automatically detects the type of device being used and adapts how it displays and navigates accordingly. It works great on mobile devices!

If you haven’t recently taken a look at offering and implementing USA Learns as part of your distance learning program’s options, I’d encourage you to do so!

USA Learns courses

USA Learns is suitable for ELLs, from beginning to high-intermediate with very basic digital literacy skills. There are currently six courses that learners can be enrolled in, as follows:

• 1st English Course
• English 1 Plus
• Second English Course
• Practice English and Reading
• Citizenship
• Skills for the Nursing Assistant

Courses are offered in English and in Spanish. All courses include activities using multiple modalities, including watching videos, reading text, listening, writing, and other assessment activities that those with even basic digital literacy skills can easily learn to use. Here’s a link to a short video you and/or your learners can view to get an idea of what the website entails and how to navigate it.

Creating teacher and student accounts

You’ll need to make a teacher account in order to track your learners’ usage time for proxy hours. You can do that here. I suggest you create one master teacher account for your whole program, create the appropriate courses within that account, and enroll all your learners so you can more easily run monthly reports for proxy hour collection.

Learners enroll in a teacher’s class with an enrollment key that you can access on your teacher account’s dashboard. An active email is required to make a student account. When student accounts are first registered, they will need to be able to check their email for an email from USA Learns which asks them to click on a link to activate and verify their account.

You can access more details, lots of supporting materials, and directions on how to run reports for proxy hours on the Distance Learning USA Learns page at https://www.literacymn.org/distancelearning/dl-platforms/usa-learns.

Questions?

If you have any questions about implementing USA Learns, please email the DL support email at: [email protected]