Job Discussion Forums

[nellychess]

Seems ideal to me. You can do extra work without risking getting caught.

Any pitfalls I'm missing?

Cheers

[Simon in Suzhou]

I don't think there are really legal pitfalls, i.e. getting deported, etc. I've never done it, but from what I've heard from others the downsides include VERY BADLY RUN online teaching companies and the headaches dealing with them, scrambling for customers who will likely drop you in favor of a blonde 23 year old Ukranian, and fairly poor pay.

[jagb6f]

Hello! I'm actually a University teacher doing exactly that right now. I can talk a little but I've only been doing it about two months, so I'm not an expert.

As Simon In Suzhou mentioned, you have to be careful of the badly run online teaching companies, so you need to do your research. I suggest joining an Online Teachers Group on Facebook, it's got thousands of teachers on it and some really good reviews of the popular schools


The requirements for good money are 1. Native Speaker 2.University Degree 3. Willingness to work Beijing peak times. If you're a University teacher in China yourself I'm sure you fulfill all of those.

I've also noticed two types of teaching companies. 1-The company assigns you classes. This is probably the best way to make a lot of money, as you'll always have students but you're stuck to that schedule, and can lose money if you have to cancel class to do anything.

2.-You try to find students yourself on the platform. That's the one I'm doing. It took about 3 weeks to get a steady supply of students, but now I have so many I've had to post a note saying I'm not accepting any more. You probably make less money this way BUT there's also no penalty if you decide to cancel class, so there's a lot more freedom.

Ending it here because I'm worried about the word limit, but let me know if you have more questions and I can answer below!

[nellychess]

[jagb6f]

Hm, I've actually never tried traveling with it before, I've only been doing it two months, but it IS nice to be able to pull in some extra income when my University is on holiday. I used it in my wife's hometown, which is a tiny, tiny village in the countryside during Spring Festival and I had absolutely no problems, however I'm not sure how good the WiFi/4G(I've used both with no problem here in China) would be if you visited places like Thailand or the Philippines, so you might need to be careful with that.

The one I use is called Language Master or Lan-Master(I've seen it both ways) and I just used it because they were advertising on Wechat moments and they can pay directly to Alipay which is super convenient.

I like them so far as they give you halfway-decent PPT slides to use for conversations with the students, but downside is they take 20% of your earnings every month. I'm not sure if that's common for other online teaching apps. I'm doing some more research on online teaching companies, and this was just the first and easiest one I found, so I might move on in the future.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

[jagb6f]

Oops, double post

[nellychess]

Ive researched a few companies, but havent applied yet. Dada seems to be the most popular. Another one called Palfish which is all on your phone seems interesting. So many ways to promote yourself, you set the pay, pay is by the minute