Your ultimate guide on “How to teach English Online”!

If you are wondering “How to teach English online” then you have landed on a right article!

English is a mandatory subject in many competitive and Govt. job exams. This is the reason why many aspirants look for English online courses or live classes that can help them with their preparation. Apart from this, English has always been a subject in which everybody wishes to hold expertise (due to its obvious benefits) and search for courses that can make them perfect at it.

With this ultimate guide right here, you will know how to make your online presence as an English teacher and start with an online teaching job. But before we start unfolding this guide for you, you need to know two things straight and clear-

1. You can make online teaching your full time job that can get you a regular income, and,
2. Educators are making good amount out of creating and selling online courses. 

Many people take these two points as myths and are not ready to believe that online teaching is actually a profession and there is nothing hoax about it. 

Moving forward with the guide, here you will get all your doubts answered about online teaching all the while getting an overview of it. 

What are the qualification criteria of teaching English online?

First thing that you need to know is that online teaching doesn’t ask for any degree. It definitely helps as an added benefit to demonstrate your expertise but it is not a mandatory element. As far as you have good knowledge on the subject and you have the confidence as well as strategy to get your knowledge across your learners, nothing else matters. Your past teaching experience, level of qualification or how successful you have been earlier in teaching, all of it has got nothing to do when you are in an independent online teaching job. 

Chose your Niche

Yes you do know that you have to teach English online but that is an umbrella concept under which you need to decide on many other sub parts. You need to set your teaching agenda according to the lessons that you would be taking. 

Instead of saying that you are an online English teacher, try to be more precise-

1. English is a broad subject so be clear as to what part will you be covering, for example, whether you would give English speaking lessons or writing lessons or maybe both. 
2. What will be the medium and form of your teaching, if you would be including live classes, online courses or recorded audio, video lessons. 
3. Who would be your target audience? As teaching English depends on the class, age and requirement of your target audience. 

Getting appropriate answers to these set of questions would give you a better approach to attract the right type of audience. 

Also, you need to remember that your niche would evolve as you will further gain experience in this domain. Hence setting a niche is not a limitation instead just a starting point to give you clarity over the direction. 

How to set up your course content?

Once you have got the clarity over the framework of your course content, you need to curate it. Collect the information from similar online sources and filter it out according to your requirement whether you are creating video lectures or simple courses. You need to follow the below mentioned steps for preparing your course modules-

1. Research about the educators who are renowned for teaching online in your domain.
2. Collect relevant information from variety of available sources.
3. Decide on the teaching combinations that you will use.
4. Make sure to add audio-visual content in your courses as they are more in demand.
5. Remove the irrelevant content.
6. Try to keep your lessons comprehensive and logical. 

How to decide about the pricing?

This step is crucial in deciding your success in the online teaching job. Right price can make you achieve your goals, get you the right audience and make your course a super hit amongst learners. So before you decide on the price, you need to get these two questions sorted-

1. What is your target earning?
2. What is the market rate for your chosen niche?

Your earning goal should be realistic and shouldn’t be driven by any huge expectations. 

The answer to this second question is “research”. See what are your competitors charging and what is the average rate of the similar courses in the market. 

There is also a smart hack to decide upon a price! You can provide your audience with a free demo lesson of the course and get to know the level of engagement and likability of the course. After which you can decide if the price needs to be further increased or decreased. 

What are the ways to promote your course?

For some who have already made their position stable as an offline educator can readily get the same audience online, but the ones who are overall beginners definitely need to work on gaining the audience. 

The first step in this direction is to get a clear mental picture as to who is your target audience and from where can you pitch them. Marketing strategies require a lot of efforts and sometimes even money so steer it into the right direction so that you can get the best out of it. This can be done by creating attractive landing pages, blogs, Facebook posts, ads etc. 

Connect with your peers

You need to build a network with people who are already eminent in your domain. This would open up a world of bright opportunities and you would be able to get better ideas from them. You can also seek for their advice or share your ideas with them for better clarification. 

Creating online courses or lessons are the best way to teach English from home! Hope you loved this guide. Best of luck!