The Coronavirus outbreak has flipped everything upside down, including education. As a result, teachers all over the world are struggling to move everything online. While online tutoring is a life savior in such a situation, considering its vast potential, the sudden shift is causing numerous challenges for both teachers and students. However, the current scenario has left us with no options but to leverage technology to its fullest to continue providing knowledge to students. If you are reading this blog, you would probably be thinking about tutoring online. Read on for steps on how to take classes online.
Steps on how to teach classes online
Finalize your requirements and goals
Understanding the niche subject areas that align with your expertise and that are preferred by your target learners is important. Perform a competitor analysis to study the competition in the market. Look at the solutions offered by tutoring businesses similar to yours to create your unique selling point (USP) to flourish above your competitors. Make a business plan to define your unique goals, including monetization expectations.
Select your audience
The next step is to choose your target audience; they can be of different demographics, educational levels, and locations. When you are starting an online tutoring business, you must define your audience to understand their characteristics and preferred learning requirements.
Group your audience into different categories as certain subjects would be preferred by some age groups alone. Likewise, the requirements of young learners and experienced professionals are different. Conduct deep-dive research of the behavioural traits as well to determine and define your audience.
Choose the subject area
Choose the subjects which you want to focus on based on your educational qualifications, experience, and passion. If you have specialization in a particular subject, you can choose the same to impart knowledge to your learner base. Based on that, you can create the curriculum for your online classes. Then, you can develop study materials and courses to support your teaching.
Create the adequate online classroom setup
You might have years of experience in teaching students in a traditional classroom. However, it doesn’t match with the experience of delivering classes in an online environment. Taking classes in an online setup is far more challenging than traditional teaching, and without an adequate online learning environment, it would become difficult to run a sustainable tutoring business.
An online tutoring website is the foundation of a great online learning environment. With potential students turning to the web to search for your tutoring services, having a strong online presence is imperative for your tutoring brand. The best way to take your teaching business online is to build a full-fledged website to gain control over the learning activities and monetization.
If you are a small-sized online tutoring business and would like to set up your tutoring website in an affordable manner, you must consider building it using tutoring software. A tutor management software will help you set up live online classes, run online courses, host webinars, and conduct group classes on your own website. Pinlearn is such a tutoring software with which you can run live online classes and courses at the same time. It comes with key features like a video conferencing tool, interactive live whiteboard, instant chat and messaging, monetization, and a lot more.
Start thinking like an entrepreneur
If you want to run an online tutoring business, stop thinking like an employee and have the mindset of an entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur requires a different mindset than handling a teaching job, as the responsibilities are more when you are running a business. When you are just pursuing a teaching job, you don’t think about an unproductive day. But you must think about it being an entrepreneur.
Setting up a tutoring website and putting up your courses or class details is not enough to grow your online tutoring business. To take your online tutoring business to new heights, you must generate great interest and engagement among your target audience. Always have an entrepreneur mindset so that it helps you to have an idea about where you would like your teaching business to lead you and the risks you are willing to accept in order to succeed. You would be more open to critical thinking as well, which is the key to a successful business.
Maintain a professional attitude
Being professional and trustworthy are two important characteristics essential for an online teacher who is new to the game.
Here are some essential factors that contribute to professionalism in online learning. environment
- Be punctual
- Offer pre-bookings for classes
- Communicate with the students about the timings beforehand
- Be well prepared with the lessons
- Send notifications to confirm classes
- Maintain a compassionate attitude towards students
Follow an engaging teaching style
No learners would like to be a part of an online classroom that is monotonous and boring. So, you must follow an engaging teaching style and constantly find new ways to make your classes fresh and fun despite conducting classes with the same students. Find interactive ways to ignite the interest of students based on the subjects and their learning pace. Use the technique of active teaching, and here is how you can do it.
- Repeat the facts that learners expressed so that they can easily recall the concept.
- Try to understand the thought process of your learners and ask them additional questions.
- Ask leading questions instead of“Yes” or “no” questions.
- Allow students to demonstrate their reasoning about how they got to their answer.
- Use a combination of audio and video lessons, one-on-one and group discussions, hands-on exercises, quizzes, and assignments.
Fix charges for online classes
Launching an online tutoring platform is a great opportunity to monetize your expertise. Regarding the pricing of your online classes, the suggestion is to have a look at the rates demanded by your competitors and industry experts. When you are just starting a tutoring business, you might have to offer some discount to get your first set of customers. The charges can vary based on factors like subject, your experience, duration, complexity, and demand in the market.
Conclusion
Teaching online is one of the most flexible ideas among the great business ideas that educators could pursue. As long as you can easily deal with the shift from offline to online, you will find running a tutoring business very rewarding. Set up an online tutoring website and be that fantastic teacher you are, and start delivering your classes online.
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