Introduction
English is the lingua Franca of
the world. Businesses and organizations around the world need to be able to
communicate with each other to function properly and show profits. The world
revolves around money and money in turn revolves around successful business
communication. That common business language is English and that is the reason
why the TEFL industry is one of the biggest industries in the world. Over many years
the face-to-face mode of instruction was the most personal and practical mode,
but with the advent of the internet, online teaching has grown very fast,
particularly over the last 5 years where hundreds of online schools have shot
up like mushrooms.
In 2020, we saw physical education
institutes having to close their doors due to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, a further incentive for all the online schools to increase their student numbers.
Now more than ever, online education is the way forward, until things return
back to normal. But even when things go back to normal the whole education
landscape might have been altered irreparably and more and more the online mode
of education will replace the physical one. More and more teachers are
discovering the benefits of online education, and it might be difficult to sway
them to return to the old system, once they have discovered the benefits of
online education, especially with respect to the bad salaries teachers get paid
in the public school system.
As a freelance online English
(EFL) teacher, I have learned some things over the last 2 years and 8 months I would like to share with you. For most who are doing this as a hobby or extra income, this article
might not be of interest, but for those who have to earn a living from online
teaching, it might help. In this article I want to address two issues: Firstly,
the different modes or types of online teaching, and secondly, the interpersonal
skills needed to become one, stay one, and to become successful by growing your
Teacherpreneural business.
I have been teaching English
online for the past 2 years and 8 months and have done more than 2000 lessons
with adult students across the world. I started out with Education First for a
meager 6 USD per hour more than 2 years ago, then teaching for a Chinese
company called Hujiang where I technically got 7.5 USD per hour (They said 15
USD per hour, but you get 7.5 USD per 25 minutes lesson and it takes you another
half-hour to complete the grading) and lastly for a Russian company named
Skyeng where I have nearly tripled that original hourly rate to 17 USD per
hour.
There are basically 3 types of
online teaching. Firstly, you can work as a freelancer for one or more schools
on a contractual basis. In this case, they provide everything, including the
platform, training on how to use that platform and what methodology they prefer,
lesson materials, scheduling, marketing, customer service, tech support, and
financial services. As a teacher all you need to do is prep for the lesson, which
is in most cases very little time, pitch up for the lesson on time, teach the
student according to school preferred methodologies, and in return get an
agreed-upon hourly rate. There are hundreds of these online schools that a teacher
can work for.
Secondly, there is an option to
register and create a profile, as a freelance teacher, on a semi-independent
basis at an online marketplace/platform such as Verbal planet, i-talki, and a
very new one I recently joined called anytutor37. Here the online market
place provides you with an opportunity to create a profile and then function
within that marketplace as your own business entity to teach students. The
company provides you with a profile, scheduling capacity, and tech support, but
does not provide any lesson materials, nor marketing. I will dig a little
deeper into this when I share my teaching experience with i-talki. Not to be
given lesson materials or resources, is however not the end of the world, as
there are companies, such as Off2class that one can pay to provide you with access
to fully professionally developed ESL materials for all levels (Beginner to
Advanced) and all areas of ESL (General English, Business English, IELTS &
TOEFL Exam prep, Listening, Reading, Speaking activities, Grammar, and
Functional language). For minimal fees, one does not necessarily need to
re-invent the wheel, especially as time in our industry, as in many others, is
the most precious commodity. One gets paid for a teaching hour and not a prep
hour, so obviously, prep time needs to be kept to the minimum.
Thirdly, you may opt to go fully independent, teaching separate from any online school or online market platform where you have to compete with other teachers for either an hourly rate or a limited amount of students. The internet is your oyster, you can market where you want to teach the students you prefer, and ask the rate you wish, without any limitations. Only it is not as easy as it seems or sounds….
1. Working as a freelancer for an online ESL school
If you work for an online school they will take about 50% plus a chunk of what you can earn. At my current school students pay more than 30 USD per hour for a native speaking English teacher. I only get a little over 50% of that. In all fairness, the school has to pay for marketing, managers, tech support….and ultimately their stockholders and the owner would also like to see a fair amount of that. Thus, if you do work as a freelance online English teacher for an online school your income potential is rather limited. That is if you prefer to teach adults only. For some reason or the other, which I struggle to grasp, your income potential teaching ESL/English online for a school that caters to children, is somewhat higher, and many native teachers teaching children between 5 and 16 earn anything between 18 and 35 USD per hour, depending on the school.
2. Having a profile as a freelancer on an online ESL market place or platform
In this mode of teaching online,
a freelance teacher is able to register an online profile on an online market
places such as Verbalplanet, i-talki, or anytutor37 (There are several others, and
a Google search will reveal them). In this scenario, the teacher creates an online profile with his biographical info, his profile picture, his teaching
methodology and an introduction video that can set him or her apart from other
teachers. He or she then opens the time slots that he or she is available and
students can then search for different teachers on the platform and if he or
she would like to book a lesson, he or she just follows the steps. Here the teacher can determine his own hourly rate but must keep in mind that he
competes with thousands of other teachers worldwide, so he needs to ask an
hourly rate that is affordable and that will make students want to book with
him.
In the beginning especially, the
teacher should ask low rates to build up a reputation. The more lessons the
teacher conducts the higher he or she may move up in the search results. At the
start it is thus important to accrue as many completed lessons that may be
credited to your account, thus forcing one to lower your hourly rates and also
offering trial lessons for 1-4USD per 30 mins trial lesson, just to get your
number of completed lessons up as quickly as possible. The faster the teacher
completes lessons the higher his ranking in search results.
Those who want to enter the
market with very high lesson rates, even though they might deserve those rates,
fail to climb rankings in search results and may get stuck there, failing to
properly off the ground. It is thus a business the teacher has to build slowly from
the ground, initially charging cheaper competitive rates, but later on, once
well-established and with a proper sustainable and reliable client base, may
charge the rates and fees he or she wishes.
The teacher literally has his own
little one-man-band teaching business within the open market place and works
semi-independently for himself. The term being used lately is that of a
Teacherpreneur. However, there are costs involved. These open market places,
such as i-talki, will take 15% of his earnings, and there are other commissions
and fees one has to pay, such as PayPal that takes a commission when the teacher wants to withdraw his earnings via PayPal into his bank account.
The teacher may also want to make use of an online platform that has ready-made, professionally developed lesson materials, such as Off2Class and depending on the number of students he or she has, will need to pay a monthly subscription fee as an additional cost. These costs add up and may diminish earnings somewhat, which will compel teachers that consider this form of online teaching to increase their rates as to make provision for these overheads, which may, in turn, price them out of the market competitively. This type of online teaching thus requires some patience and humility on the part of a teacher that wants to function semi-independently.
3. Fully independent: No platforms or commissions
This sounds great, doesn’t it?
You don’t need to work for a company neither do you have to share some of your
earnings with an online open marketplace. Despite the obvious benefits such as
independence, unlimited fees, and rates and determining one’s own rules, terms
and conditions; what are the disadvantages or rather the challenges of setting
up this own teaching business where the teacher is the CEO, the teacher, the
bookkeeper, the admin assistant, and the chief cook and bottle washer? Well,
the question itself says everything: You have to be and do everything. You will
need some IT skills such as creating and managing your own website and Social
Media presence, as well as either having or quickly learning how to effectively
market yourself online via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Furthermore, you
need to set up an e-commerce store or online store, using a service such as
Ecwid, and fully integrate that into your website, because you want students to
pay you for your services. That means setting up PayPal or Payoneer and linking
that with your bank account so that you can withdraw your earnings into your
bank account. You won’t have a tech support team or IT developer expert behind
you to sort our issues, you will need to do it yourself unless you have funds
to afford services like that. There is no online school or open market place to
organize your scheduling on your behalf or help you with tech issues, you and
only you will need to communicate with the student and do the scheduling. I think
you get the picture, if something needs to be done, you’re it, and the buck
stops with you. Then again, if you do have the courage and the skills and
resourcefulness, and mostly the drive to set it up and wait a bit, hourly rates
for teachers like these can be anything between 30 and 100 USD, and a
10 000 USD monthly income, usually reserved for lawyers, doctors, pilots, and engineers, may be yours for the taking.
Not to mention all the benefits
of working remotely from the comfort of your own home. No traffic jams, no ‘office-wear’
expenses, spending your off-hours with your family, essentially not being
overworked and underpaid by a governmental education department (This applies
throughout the world, but more so in my native South Africa) and not having to
face the “crocodile” every day, with the added Coronavirus epidemic, that
brings most school teachers to their knees and to tears everyday….just so that
they can make more debt to pay off their other debt. Online teaching has
increased in its popularity now more than ever, because apart from some
disadvantages that are few and insignificant, it allows for teachers to not
only be appreciated in words (Which in some countries does not even apply), but
to be fairly and financially rewarded, so that they too can taste the good
things in life.
The key here however is that it
takes time to get skilled in all the various aspects of setting it up; it takes
courage, patience, and perseverance. However, It can be done! In the opinion of
the writer and from his own personal experience, I think it prudent,
responsible and manageable to start off by working for an online school that
pays you a fixed hourly rate, until you come to grips with the industry, the
methodologies, the trends, until you gain experience on how to teach online. I
was a face-to-face teacher for 17 years and it is a different way of doing
things. You no longer stand in front of a whiteboard or blackboard with
students in chairs in front of you, you are now in front of a screen in a
digital classroom and you need to change your teaching style somewhat, you need
to learn to use the tools and digital whiteboard to teach digitally.
You gain experience only by
sitting in your “online” chair and learning to use all the tools effectively,
by making mistakes, lots of mistakes and laughing at yourself, apologizing to
your students a lot for many things that are sometimes beyond your
control…..there are so many variables, so many things that can go wrong, like
tech issues, connection issues, if you live in South Africa, power failures and
load-shedding, students with personal issues, etc. For more than one day,
especially during the worldwide lockdown period, I had to counsel my students,
who were panicking….some students have lost their jobs, others were home-bound
and getting depressed. Not only are you responsible for their English language
learning, you sometimes need to listen, to encourage, be Dr. Phil on the air
for them. Students are not machines or case numbers, they are real people with
real needs, who sometimes just wanna chat about life because they are afraid
and uncertain as to what the future may bring. In these surreal situations,
your framework of referencing needs to extend beyond just teaching English, it
must include the emotional and mental welfare of your student. That means, you
yourself must have acquired these skills from the “University of life”.
If you are willing to go
semi-independent or fully independent, your income potential becomes unlimited
(There are teachers out there working for themselves earning anything between
30-100 USD per hour). At the moment I do teach semi-independently with i-talki where
teachers can set their own rates, but the downfall is that you have to do your
own marketing to attract students. I-talki merely provides teachers with an
online market platform within which they can operate as their own online
teaching business entity. Teachers may ask what they like, but in order to be
competitive and attract students, you can’t price yourself out of the market.
You have to slowly build your online teaching business over time, logging as
many lessons as you can for cheaper competitive prices until you have conducted
enough lessons to show up in the search results. It seems only those with the
most lessons show up on the first page of the search results when potential
students are looking for language teachers. It is thus a catch-22 situation.
You don’t want to undersell your value, but it seems according to research that
students only trust and book teachers who have conducted many lessons, and they
won’t fall over their feet to book teachers with few or fewer lessons than
those who have conducted hundreds or even thousands of lessons. It is thus very
difficult to get your foot in the door. In the last 5 months since I have
joined i-talki I have only conducted 80 lessons with 2 regular Russian
students, a Croatian student, and a couple of one-off ‘walk-ins’. I get less
approximately 14.50 USD per 45 minutes lesson, which is less than what I get at
my current full-time employer. I-talki also takes a 15% service fee for
providing an online market platform, scheduling, general marketing, customer
service support, and for ensuring payment, which is all fair enough. It does
however mean that in order to get approximately 14.50 USD you have to charge
the student approximately 16.50 USD.
During the lockdown, when my Russian
company could not provide the ideal amount of lessons which I had per week
during the pre-lockdown period, i-talki provided a supplemental income that
came in very handy, so I was happy with getting less, but at least getting
something rather than nothing. One does however need to patiently build your
i-talki profile and presence until you have reached that golden amount of
lessons that will ensure that algorithms start to promote your profile on the
main page. There are thousands of English teachers on i-talki and you only
start to get noticed when you have conducted many hundreds of lessons at least.
That is of course unless you are able to attract your own students to your
i-talki profile through various social media ad campaigns that you have to
vigorously drive yourself.
For those teachers that want to
go fully independent, not sharing any of their income with online market
platforms such as i-talki, the road to success is even harder. An independent
teacher has to create his or her own website and market that via Social Media
sites. There are no guarantees but if successful, the income potential could be
up to 100 USD per hour lesson. There are experts like James Liu who offer
workshops to teachers who want to go fully independent. They offer step-by-step
lessons and instructions on how to set up your own independent online teaching
business and how to market it appropriately, to become a fully independent
entrepreneur. Well, I’m not there yet. Even though I have my own fully
functional website, called TEFLMAXONLINE, where students can book lessons from,
I neither have the time, nor money to market myself at the moment. It is
however something that I’m working towards.
So what are the things that makes a person suitable and good at online
teaching?
Apart from all the things
mentioned above on how to become a successful teacherpreneur, such as being
tech-savvy and having the drive and motivation to sit in a chair for 5
hours plus a day and engage with all sorts of people from over the world with different
language and social skill barriers; you need to possess certain inter-personal
skills. Interpersonal skills are the skills required to effectively
communicate, interact, and work with individuals and groups. Those with good
interpersonal skills are strong verbal and non-verbal communicators and are
often considered to be “good with people”. (Corporate finance Institute, 2015:online). These skills include: Awareness (of
yourself and others), Caring about other people and comforting people when they
need it, Empathy for others, Encouraging and inspiring people to do their best,
Inspiring and motivating others to active greatness, Respect for everyone, no
matter who they are, Sensitivity toward the preferences and wishes of others Clear
communication skills, Conflict management and resolution skills, Diplomacy
(handling affairs without hostility), Flexibility in thinking and operating
style, Humour and light-heartedness, Listening well, Networking and building
relationships, Non-verbal cues and body language, Patience when dealing with
others, Socializing skills, Being good at building trust, and Tolerance and
respect.
It is important to build rapport
over a period of time. My students, some of whom have done more than 100
lessons with me, are not merely a number or a client. I show interest in their
private and personal lives, lending an ear when there challenges in their lives
and giving encouragement when needed. I share my life, my challenges,
adventures, emotions with them in turn and give them an opportunity to have
inputs into my life, so they also feel part of that. This builds mutual respect
and trust, and that, in turn, brings about and establishes long-term partnerships
and even in some cases friendship. In a later post, I will go into more detail
about the necessary interpersonal skills needed by a teacher, but if I have to
highlight the 3 most important skills an online teacher should possess, I will
have to say that they are: Firstly, being able to build trust and rapport by
respecting others and being aware of different cultures, secondly, being a good
listener (Some platforms encourage this in their KPI’s by requiring the teacher
to limit Teacher Talk Time (TTT) and increasing Student Talk Time (STT)), and
lastly, humor and light-heartedness. I try to make my students laugh as much
as possible, but that is my unique style.
It is important to harness your
own personality strengths, cultivating your own unique style and utilizing
that in your lessons, to encourage recurring and returning students who like
your particular style of teaching and who are benefitting from that, to keep on
coming back for more, not just because you might be this amazing Grammar expert
or excellent teacher, but because you care about them as a person and an
individual. This does not mean that you will ‘click’ with everyone and that everyone
who starts with you will stay to the end, but where possible the right type of
student fit for your personality will remain with you long term. And that is
what you want, a sustainable livelihood by building a good reputation that will
spread by word of mouth to increase your clientele and continue to make your
little Teacherpreneurial business grow.
For many, due to COVID 19 and
consequent lockdown and other restrictions, regular jobs or regular face to
face teaching jobs are no longer available or possible. Online teaching is a way
to earn a livelihood remotely. Apart from the qualifications (At least a 3 year
Bachelor’s degree and a TEFL certificate) and inter-personal skills (mentioned
above) necessary, one needs to have the courage to make the transition from
working face-to-face with people to engaging with them online and remotely.
This transition is very easy for younger people as they grew up in this
tech-savvy age, but it can pose some challenges for older people like me. These
are however not insurmountable, as long as one has an attitude and aptitude for
learning new things. It took me a while, but now after nearly 3 years of
conducting online lessons, I can see my efforts come to fruition.
Conclusion
Online teaching has become
increasingly more popular for both teachers and students. Due to the
Geo-political landscape over the last 8 months many skilled people across the
world have lost their jobs and livelihoods. Teaching English online in
particular is a way for many of these professionals to put food on the table
each month. However, before you consider doing this consider whether you have what
it takes to be an online teacher, not only with regards to qualifications but
also with regards to personality and skills. It is a very competitive industry
now quickly getting over-saturated with people trying to earn a living. Make
sure that you count not only the rewards of becoming an online teacher but
that you also calculate the cost and efforts you may need to invest.