“Mr. Stein goes online”, and with him the whole world. The way we learn has evolved; how we teach, however, has yet to change.
With globalisation and democratisation of education, the number of private teachers has increased drastically. China and India, with their fast-growing economies, regulate the education market and form a huge demand, especially in language learning.
Increase your competitiveness
Let’s see how you can keep up in international language market and gain more students.
- teach online
- create and deliver relevant study materials
- get to know your students capabilities and needs
- customise materials accordingly
- treat students personally
Become an online tutor
Online tutoring market has evolved hugely during last decade. Therefor, if you want to keep on track, you should go online. I’ll explain the whys in details.
Why should you teach online?
- to reach out more students
- to charge at international rates and make more money
- to be flexible and manage your time
- to work wherever you want to from
- to be your OWN boss
How should you start teaching online?
There are a lot of tools and services to help you start an online teaching: from simple to fancy ones. What suits you best depends on how much initial knowledge and money you have to invest. I’ll go through the most popular solutions.
- Skype
- Zoom
- Google Tools (Meet, Drive)
- Udemy
- Coursera
- Tutor Platform
If you’ve noticed I’ve started from simple tools and gone to more ultimate ones. In my next article, I’ll introduce you all decent online teaching tools and compare pros and cons of each of them.
A small tip from my side: If you want to succeed as an online instructor, try to take a an online course yourself (as a student). As a result, you’ll understand which pain points students can face and will be able to address them.
Create relevant learning materials
Unlike teaching neighbourhood students, working with internationals presupposes its realms. You should consider cultural and historical context when preparing study materials. For, there can be tabu-topics or your study materials can contain outdated information. In both cases, this will lower the value of the content and distract students’ motivation.
That’s why get to know to the country you’re going to teach. Understand your students’
- learning goals
- learning ways
- circle of interests
- ups and downs
If you put these questions into the core of your teaching, you’ll be able to create up-to-dated, individualised learning content.
For developing your own teaching materials you have several tools at your disposal.
Some of them are:
- Kahoot (quizzes)
- Quizlet
- Socrative
- Tutor interactive book
Again, I’ll elaborate on the thorough description and comparison of these tools in a separate post.
Improve student performance
After you’ve created quality study material tailored for your students, it’s time to put it into action. Practice with it, see how students progress and modify it accordingly. Polish your teaching content constantly based on the feedback from students and your own observations.
This in mind, I should, unfortunately, state there are not that many possibilities allowing teachers like you to monitor students’ performance, see where they fail and what strengths they have. Luckily enough, Tutor Platform provides detailed analytics on learning outcome. With it, you can reveal your students’ overall performance, learning style, mistakes and time they spend on learning a vocab, get recommendations on teaching approaches and complementary learning materials.
Where to start?
Are you now eager to start your journey into the online teaching? Bear with me, in my next articles I’ll go through all details and instruct you how to start online tutoring.
Meanwhile, comment and share with me with your own experience of online teaching and what your biggest concerns have been so far.
Cheers!
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