Tutoring can be a way to earn money for both students and experienced teachers. According to the research centers, about 30% of families with children use the services of tutors. Nearly half (40%) of high school parents hire teachers for their children.
Recently, online teaching has been gaining more and more popularity. Choosing this work format, the tutor dramatically facilitates the process both for himself and his ward. For example, the lesson participants can be located in different parts of the world. No one needs to waste time looking for a suitable meeting room on the road. All you need to have at hand is a computer or smartphone with high-speed Internet access. Let’s take a step-by-step look at creating the best online language class.
Define Your Level of Knowledge and Audience
It is not necessary to have a pedagogical education to work as a tutor. Much more important is the deep knowledge of the subject that specialized specialists have: philologists, mathematicians, historians. For beginners, it is best to start by teaching the school curriculum, as this is more accessible material.
Make Your Learning Marketable
While broad themes are attractive, they tend to be more challenging to create, develop, and maintain because they often have more competition.
But even in a too narrow topic, there can also be difficulties. For example, if you created an Introduction to Woodworking course, it will be much harder to sell than, for example, Making Wooden Storage Boxes. However, the content of the classes may be very similar. Focus on a specific skill that your students will master at the end of the training rather than a general idea.
Ask yourself the following questions when you start planning your training:
- Can people be taught this?
- Will my students be able to use what I teach?
- Does it interest me enough to do it for a long time?
- Do I have an audience for this?
Schedule
Think about how many classes you are willing to spend per day and how long one lesson will last: 45 minutes (academic hour) or 60 minutes. You can start an online calendar and make it open not to waste your time surveying and recording students. Then the wards will see the free slots and sign up independently.
Prepare Study Materials
One of the few disadvantages of online teaching is the preparation of materials. There are many textbooks and tests available on the Internet for free, but you will probably have to digitize some manuals.
Think about how you will pass the materials to the students. One option is to send it during class. All information can also be uploaded to the cloud or Google Drive; then, the student will have access to the materials at any time.
Choose a Contact Method
The most common are instant messengers with a video function (Skype, Zoom, etc.). But there are also special services for online tutors, such as RealtimeBoard and Idroom with interactive whiteboards. With their help, you can visually explain new material to the student in real-time.
Record Your Lessons
Many course authors often find writing down an entire course extremely difficult. It’s a big task, so they put it off or don’t start it at all. You do not need to record all the lessons of all modules at once. Record your first lessons or first module and start uploading videos to the platform of your choice for online learning. Then move on to creating tests for that particular module.
Once everything is ready, give your students access to this module. This way, you can gradually create all the lessons, and the students will be included in the training at this time and will be able to give you their feedback.
After receiving feedback, you can consider all the comments and recommendations and make your lessons as informative and easy to understand as possible.
Summary
Did you dream of trying as an online course teacher or already have experience teaching offline and want to move online? Now it is a good time for this. Set yourself up and follow the steps described above, and you will certainly succeed!