Seven reasons why you’d better start teaching online today

I know what you’re thinking. Do we even have another option during the COVID-19 pandemic? Ok, but why don’t you adopt state-of-the-art teaching methods and stick with it even after the global lockdown is over?

Summary of reasons:

1. Feel at home… literally!
2. Don’t waste your time on the commute
3. Enjoy a larger client base
4. Take advantage of revision facilities
5. Make education more affordable
6. Be your own master
7. Stay safe

1. Feel at home… literally!

Have you ever wished you could wear almost anything you wanted to work? Are you always whining about your school’s dress code? Teaching online has you covered then. As long as your look presentable in the webcam frame (wearing a suit and even a tie) you won’t have to worry about your clothing below the waistline.

It doesn’t mean, though, that you should teach in shorts and slippers because your attire – even the parts hidden from the webcam – can make you too relaxed and this might be reflected in your behavior in an online class.

2. Don’t waste your time on the commute

Even in small towns, a typical commute takes the teacher around half an hour, and most schools require their teachers to be on the premises at least 15 minutes before the class time. Now add to it the preparation time before you leave home and the time it takes to get into your comfy home clothes after arrival.

In online classes, you can literally jump out of bed and into your online class – Pro tip: In emergencies, keep the webcam off at the beginning of the lesson to give yourself time to button up your shirt (the only item of clothing visible to your students) and comb your hair (if you have any).

The time you save by teaching online can be well spent on better lesson planning or personal and professional development in general. Believe me, once you become a serious online teacher, the commute of physical classes will feel so painful and intolerable that you will barely accept any of them from your school.

3. Enjoy a larger client base

Cities are divided into neighborhoods and every language school covers a certain radius around itself. That’s why the chances are that only students from your neighborhood know you and can become your students. If you teach at various schools, this number can increase but you can never extend your reach beyond your own town/city.

By teaching online, you simply go beyond the physical borders and can reach potential students out of your town/city or even your country. Your marketing power is the only limit.

4. Take advantage of revision facilities

“Excuse me, sir? Can I take a picture of the whiteboard, please?”, “May I record your voice, please?” or “Could you share the slides with us after the lesson today?”. These and similar ones are questions my students would ask me in physical classes. But such demands are irrelevant in online lessons thanks to two facilities at the teacher’s disposal:

Shared Whiteboard

I use Google docs as the whiteboard in my online classes and write on them everything I’d like to visually share with my students, from text and images to links. Because my students have the link to the whiteboard, they too can write on the whiteboard simultaneously making my lessons very collaborative. They can later review the lesson as the whiteboard (Google doc) will always be accessible to them.

Class recording

The whole lesson can also be recorded. Virtually every online teaching platform allows the teacher to record the lesson. Skype, for example, keeps the class recording on its cloud servers free of charge for 30 days. If the students want/need to, they can download the class recording to their computers.

5. Make education more affordable

Language schools have considerable overhead costs including the rent of the school building, hardware such as chairs and whiteboards, electricity, air conditioning, paper, etc. All of these costs are indirectly paid for by the unsuspecting students. In online educations, many of those costs simply do not exist! Broadband subscriptions are so reasonably priced today that you needn’t worry about the bills. Besides, your home needs the Internet connection anyway so teaching online doesn’t mean you have to pay anything extra. So when the freelance teacher or language school pays for nothing more than a highspeed Internet subscription, naturally the fees drop for the language learners, and even after that reduction in fees, the profit margin for the teacher/school would be more. Everyone wins!

Another area where the learners can save is the commute. They can cut down significantly on fuel or transport costs by studying from home.

6. Be your own master

In conventional teaching, you need to take your student to a quiet room with at least two chairs, a table, and a whiteboard. This means you should either rent a place for your teaching (not affordable for most teachers) or teach for others and in their school.

Online teachers, on the other hand, can become more easily independent from their language school. It is way easier to run your classes online than face-to-face because all you need is a laptop, a decent internet connection, and a quiet corner of your home.

7. Stay safe

Maybe the least affected jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic are online businesses. As a primarily online teacher, my working conditions have not changed much because I #stayhome anyway!