Guest Post by: Kris Jagasia
Over the last couple of years there has been an explosion in the popularity of live online learning. Every online learning environment is different, but the basics remain the same. Teachers and Students connect via a video-conferencing system (e.g. Skype, Google Hangouts, WizIQ), the teacher shares lesson content (often organized in PowerPoint) by screen sharing and educate their students in an online version of a real-life classroom. English as a second language (ESL) has been one of the most popular subjects to go online. There are a plethora of services offering online English lessons; from large online language schools (LiveMocha) to individual teachers who have launched their own sites.
For any native English speakers that are looking for opportunities to earn money from home, online ESL lessons can be a great avenue to pursue.
Wait, but don’t I need to be a teacher?
Some ESL teacher training is certainly beneficial to teaching English online; but it is not essential. To get some teaching experience under your belt, if you don’t know anyone in need of ESL training personally, you can volunteer your services to immigration charities in your local community.
Recently, I launched a service to provide ESL lesson content to teachers who run their own lessons online. We’ve only been live for a couple months, but one of the biggest surprises for me has been the number of non-trained ESL teachers that have launched into the world of online teaching. Every story is unique. Some of these non-trained teachers are teaching their own kids to speak English, others are doing NGO work in small remote villages, and some have decided to start teaching online from home as a secondary career opportunity.
Why go online?
For teachers that are already teaching private English lessons, we suggest going online. ESL teachers have been supplementing their day jobs with private tuition for decades, if not longer! Many successful tutors have eventually started their own bricks-and-mortar language institutes.
So why do you suggest and recommend teaching English online?
1. Technical requirements are low (as are costs)
From a technical perspective all you’ll need is Paypal, Gmail and Skype (or another video-conferencing system) to launch your business. Each of these services is free to use. As you grow your business, your investment in infrastructure will be limited (a website/landing page and other nice-to-haves are easy to access at a low cost). Recently, a wonderful blog has launched which will give you all the ins and outs of setting up your online ESL business.
2. Kill your commute – take on more students
In many cities, traveling to your student’s home or to other premises can be an inefficient way to teach. A one-hour lesson easily becomes three hours with a long commute between classes. Your ability to take on more students grows with an online teaching business.
3. Take on a global student base
By creating an online home for your business and employing some basic student acquisition and management strategies, you can create a following for your services and start converting referrals into new students. You can reach students all over the world.
Two Teaching English Online Fundamentals: Students and Content
There are two fundamentals to a successful online ESL business: paying students and engaging lesson content.
It is important to start building your student contact list as soon as possible. Even if you are currently teaching in a traditional classroom and you’re only considering teaching English online, it is important to start your contact list for the future. Be sure to keep in touch with past students and parents with short notes for birthdays, graduations and other milestones. Your personal teaching relationships will be the key to obtaining your first paying students when you do decide to go online. Managing contacts is simple; a basic Excel spreadsheet will suffice.
If you are not currently an ESL teacher, you may want to start growing your contact list by either volunteering or joining an existing online language institute. As you gain experience as an online teacher, you’ll be simultaneously building out your contact list.
You need engaging content to run your lessons and to keep students coming back. The content required for a lesson plan focused on the traditional classroom is quite different from what is required in a private conversation class. For a private ESL lesson you need a “conversation guider,” such as a prompt to direct natural conversation between the teacher and the student, which also delivers the target grammar and vocabulary.
This is where we (Off2Class) come in. We noticed there was a lack of suitable ready-to-use resources targeted at private ESL teachers. So far, we’ve released a set of 145 ESL lesson plans covering grammar, vocabulary and phonics, and our library grows every week.
We are currently in private beta though you can obtain a free account by requesting one on the contact form on our homepage. All of our lessons are on an easy-to-use web platform and perfectly suited for teaching ESL online. Each lesson plan comes with an adjoining set of teacher notes, which will coach you on how to teach each slide to your students.
About the Author:
Kris Jagasia is one half of the team behind Off2Class (lesson plan content for private ESL teachers). Off2Class was launched after realizing there was a lack of suitable lesson content resources targeted towards teachers running their own private tutorials.
Off2Class Demo: