I'd like to learn more about the opportunities and drawbacks of teaching live on the net. If someone could give me a couple of links to Asian agencies that use westerners to teach locals English via high speed Internet you would make me a happy guy as I just drew a blank searching the net.
All the best
Simon
Broadband distance learning
Moderators: Dimitris, maneki neko2, Lorikeet, Enrico Palazzo, superpeach, cecil2, Mr. Kalgukshi2
I would say this is not as widespread at the moment as you may think. Most Asian countries can source Westerners to teach actual classes.
Also, this is a field that is still under quite some development. The company I work for does e-learning for business English in Asia, but we don't use live tutors. We use voice recognition and microphone practice for speaking, we have a program that checks a student's writing text, and we have exercises for reading, listening, grammar and vocab. We find this way is quite effective although most of our courses use a blended approach (classroom+online work). PM me if you want to know more.
my site: www.roadtogrammar.com
Also, this is a field that is still under quite some development. The company I work for does e-learning for business English in Asia, but we don't use live tutors. We use voice recognition and microphone practice for speaking, we have a program that checks a student's writing text, and we have exercises for reading, listening, grammar and vocab. We find this way is quite effective although most of our courses use a blended approach (classroom+online work). PM me if you want to know more.
my site: www.roadtogrammar.com
Simon,
Try http://www.tobyscafe.com its written for ESL teachers who are interested in teaching English online. Culture Link is a good place to start if you want to post your resume and start teaching privately. I've also listed several other places where you can find students to teach: http://www.tobyscafe.com/teachingguide/p7.htm.
Sticky mail me if you need further help.
Try http://www.tobyscafe.com its written for ESL teachers who are interested in teaching English online. Culture Link is a good place to start if you want to post your resume and start teaching privately. I've also listed several other places where you can find students to teach: http://www.tobyscafe.com/teachingguide/p7.htm.
Sticky mail me if you need further help.
-
kathyfelts
- Posts: 69
- Joined: Thu Jul 29, 2004 1:45 pm
Excellent question!
I agree with Emile that it is going to take a while for online teaching with a webcam and real interactivity - as opposed to online courses that are not one-on-one - to come into their own.
The most obvious problem is that there can be technical problems. I rarely have problems using MSN. MSN has chat, video, file sharing, a whiteboard and application and desktop sharing. The file sharing is a little slow, but that is only an issue with large files such as MP3. I use MSN when all else fails. Skype has excellent audio and better file sharing capabilities, and it has audio and video, but not application and desktop sharing. My daughter takes statistics with a company in India. They use a virtual classroom which has a lot of great features, but sometimes the technology fails and that can be a problem. However the functionality is great. India is fast becoming not on the business processing capital of the world, but the knowledge processing capital as well.
There other, less obvious, obstacles for teaching English in real time in Asia. First, and less important, is that when you have technical difficulties - especially with a child who is just starting to learn English, you need someone to sort out the problem. This introduces a new person - and a new cost. I have found that this person can be invaluable not only for technical help, but in communicating with parents. Second, and more important, I think many Asian parents are especially careful about their children's online time. Moreover, they prefer to work through someone they know. Again, this interface adds more cost - and less pay to the teacher.
At this time, I don't think that teaching online is a very efficient way to make a living, especially for certified teachers who can make much more in the classroom. That said, the Internet and webcam teaching can be powerful teaching tools. I think that one-on-one instruction will probably always be a premium service. I have been trying to set up some free classes for groups of Chinese-speaking students, but there are a lot of hurdles there too.
Unless your purpose it to prepare yourself for the future, online teaching may be something to put on the back burner - but maybe not for too long. One thing you can do now, is to prepare for the time when online teaching does become more fully realizable.
One more note - one other piece to this puzzle will be how teachers recruit students (and I do mean recruit - you cannot just hang out a shingle). Yesterday I got an email from a young teacher in the Philippines who has set up a website to help link teachers and students - the young man who posted above. He has obvioulsy put out a lot of effort for his "hobby" and I think the website will be very useful. I also have gotten an email from SpokenSkills.com, which also looks promising. You might want to check it out as well. I think that these kinds of sites can be a real missing piece in getting online students and teachers together.
Despite the problems associated with teaching with a webcam, I still really like it and plan to stick with it - but I am not ready to quit my day job. I get up every morning at 4am - remember the time differnce - ready to go. I discover new ways to do thing everyday and I really enjoy my students. When I first started this, I didn't realize that I would come to enjoy teaching my online students as much as I enjoy teaching students in the classroom.
Good luck! Tell us what happens.
Kathy Felts
PS I just went back and looked at spokenskills.com more carefully. There is more on the site than I initially realized. They have some culture tools as well as some teacher tools. I will look back at both Toby's site and SS and write more next time. Maybe with these two sites the furture will get here a bit more quickly than I thought.
I agree with Emile that it is going to take a while for online teaching with a webcam and real interactivity - as opposed to online courses that are not one-on-one - to come into their own.
The most obvious problem is that there can be technical problems. I rarely have problems using MSN. MSN has chat, video, file sharing, a whiteboard and application and desktop sharing. The file sharing is a little slow, but that is only an issue with large files such as MP3. I use MSN when all else fails. Skype has excellent audio and better file sharing capabilities, and it has audio and video, but not application and desktop sharing. My daughter takes statistics with a company in India. They use a virtual classroom which has a lot of great features, but sometimes the technology fails and that can be a problem. However the functionality is great. India is fast becoming not on the business processing capital of the world, but the knowledge processing capital as well.
There other, less obvious, obstacles for teaching English in real time in Asia. First, and less important, is that when you have technical difficulties - especially with a child who is just starting to learn English, you need someone to sort out the problem. This introduces a new person - and a new cost. I have found that this person can be invaluable not only for technical help, but in communicating with parents. Second, and more important, I think many Asian parents are especially careful about their children's online time. Moreover, they prefer to work through someone they know. Again, this interface adds more cost - and less pay to the teacher.
At this time, I don't think that teaching online is a very efficient way to make a living, especially for certified teachers who can make much more in the classroom. That said, the Internet and webcam teaching can be powerful teaching tools. I think that one-on-one instruction will probably always be a premium service. I have been trying to set up some free classes for groups of Chinese-speaking students, but there are a lot of hurdles there too.
Unless your purpose it to prepare yourself for the future, online teaching may be something to put on the back burner - but maybe not for too long. One thing you can do now, is to prepare for the time when online teaching does become more fully realizable.
One more note - one other piece to this puzzle will be how teachers recruit students (and I do mean recruit - you cannot just hang out a shingle). Yesterday I got an email from a young teacher in the Philippines who has set up a website to help link teachers and students - the young man who posted above. He has obvioulsy put out a lot of effort for his "hobby" and I think the website will be very useful. I also have gotten an email from SpokenSkills.com, which also looks promising. You might want to check it out as well. I think that these kinds of sites can be a real missing piece in getting online students and teachers together.
Despite the problems associated with teaching with a webcam, I still really like it and plan to stick with it - but I am not ready to quit my day job. I get up every morning at 4am - remember the time differnce - ready to go. I discover new ways to do thing everyday and I really enjoy my students. When I first started this, I didn't realize that I would come to enjoy teaching my online students as much as I enjoy teaching students in the classroom.
Good luck! Tell us what happens.
Kathy Felts
PS I just went back and looked at spokenskills.com more carefully. There is more on the site than I initially realized. They have some culture tools as well as some teacher tools. I will look back at both Toby's site and SS and write more next time. Maybe with these two sites the furture will get here a bit more quickly than I thought.
I have just the site for you to look into this. www.efenglishtown.com ( cursos de ingles) has live clases with western teachers teaching not only asian's but people from all over the world. I believe they have about 300 teachers in their staff. I have taken their free trial and actually keps a subscription for a few months to see it myself and must say it is quite a good service. They realy push students to practice English live with teachers and not with these voice recognition tools which in my opinion look good but don't provide any contructive feedback you can use. The cool thing about this class is it is really international. Depending on when you go to a class there are students from the Americas, Europe or Asia. Check it out!
Hiyas, my name is Shane and I'm a EFL teacher in Spain and I'm really interested in all of this. I signed up with a couple of Spanish friends to englishtown and globalenglish to see how thet worked and I thought some of you might like to hear what I thought, I just kind of looked over my friend's shoulder while she participated in the globalenglish class.
The sofware was macromedia Breeze which was fairly straightforward to set up. There were about 4 -7 students in each class which wasn't a bad class size, mostly made up of working professionals, mainly Europeans, a couple of Aisian students and one from Saudi Arabia. The sound quality and volume levels were very erratic, differing greatly between one student and another, although the teacher could be heard clearly. No-one used webcams, only mics.
The teacher went through the list of students, giving them a chance to introduce themselves, and then introduced the topic of the day, business travel in English speaking countries. accompanied by a power point style presentation. There were only about five slides but it was clear that the teacher hadn't looked over them previously. Then he asked the first conversation question on the screen, about personal experiences, to the first student who it turned out has been with globalenglish for 2 years, and passed control of the microphone to him
First student replied, and went on for about two minutes talking while in the bottom a few other students iniciated a text chat in an incorporated messenger style module within the Breeze program. This for me gave the same impression as students whispering in a classroom while they should be paying attention to the student who was talking. Then again maybe it's just one of the differences beteween classroom and online classroom ettiqute
When the student stopped talking there was a silence before the teacher realised that he had actually finished talking and took the mic back. Now I expected the teacher to feed back on a few mistakes the student had made, but no, He just gave the same question to the next student on the list and passed him the microphone.
As soon as the second student, a female lawyer from Kazakhstan, started speaking, the teacher joined the chat session down below which had now changed from business travel to another student who was usually in the class but today was absent. As the lawyer stumbled on, grasping at words for about four minutes saying basically the same thing, but in poorer English as the student before her, the rest of the class, teacher included were adding there two cents worth to the text chat which was going on in the module at the bottom of the screen.
There was another silence while the teacher noticed that the lady had stopped talking and then said "That's great .. ahh...Margerita. Let's move on" and another picture and couple of conversation questions popped up which he dutifully assigned to the next pupil on the list.
This went on for the next 45 minutes in which the teacher did in fact correct some pronunciation errors and the text conversation returned to the subject at hand, with the teacher even pointing out some useful lexical phrases until we unexpectedly came to the end of the slides ten minutes early. Our teacher made a short rehearsed encouraging pep talk ending with "And remember, if the teacher doesn't say that he can't understand you, it means that he can" before making an early exit and leaving us to pass the microphone around between ourselves.
Please let me know what you thought about this review and if you have any experience with similar programs let me know.
Yours, Shane.
The sofware was macromedia Breeze which was fairly straightforward to set up. There were about 4 -7 students in each class which wasn't a bad class size, mostly made up of working professionals, mainly Europeans, a couple of Aisian students and one from Saudi Arabia. The sound quality and volume levels were very erratic, differing greatly between one student and another, although the teacher could be heard clearly. No-one used webcams, only mics.
The teacher went through the list of students, giving them a chance to introduce themselves, and then introduced the topic of the day, business travel in English speaking countries. accompanied by a power point style presentation. There were only about five slides but it was clear that the teacher hadn't looked over them previously. Then he asked the first conversation question on the screen, about personal experiences, to the first student who it turned out has been with globalenglish for 2 years, and passed control of the microphone to him
First student replied, and went on for about two minutes talking while in the bottom a few other students iniciated a text chat in an incorporated messenger style module within the Breeze program. This for me gave the same impression as students whispering in a classroom while they should be paying attention to the student who was talking. Then again maybe it's just one of the differences beteween classroom and online classroom ettiqute
When the student stopped talking there was a silence before the teacher realised that he had actually finished talking and took the mic back. Now I expected the teacher to feed back on a few mistakes the student had made, but no, He just gave the same question to the next student on the list and passed him the microphone.
As soon as the second student, a female lawyer from Kazakhstan, started speaking, the teacher joined the chat session down below which had now changed from business travel to another student who was usually in the class but today was absent. As the lawyer stumbled on, grasping at words for about four minutes saying basically the same thing, but in poorer English as the student before her, the rest of the class, teacher included were adding there two cents worth to the text chat which was going on in the module at the bottom of the screen.
There was another silence while the teacher noticed that the lady had stopped talking and then said "That's great .. ahh...Margerita. Let's move on" and another picture and couple of conversation questions popped up which he dutifully assigned to the next pupil on the list.
This went on for the next 45 minutes in which the teacher did in fact correct some pronunciation errors and the text conversation returned to the subject at hand, with the teacher even pointing out some useful lexical phrases until we unexpectedly came to the end of the slides ten minutes early. Our teacher made a short rehearsed encouraging pep talk ending with "And remember, if the teacher doesn't say that he can't understand you, it means that he can" before making an early exit and leaving us to pass the microphone around between ourselves.
Please let me know what you thought about this review and if you have any experience with similar programs let me know.
Yours, Shane.