The Highs and Lows of Teaching From Home

Obviously, COVID-19 caused too many changes which affected nearly every aspect of our social life. This is hard to object to and hard to ignore, since “new normals” dictate their specific rules and requirements. Education used to be a huge part of our life. And it still is. But because of a global pandemic, which seems almost never-ending at times, online education and teaching through the Internet rapidly gain popularity.

There are lots of folks who strongly believe that distance learning just can’t deliver the same quality of education. They think that online learning is not effective compared to traditional brick and mortar learning approaches. But we also have millions of online learners who’ve already gone through online classes and actually acknowledged the effectiveness of online education.

Many different aspects that we have witnessed during 2020 (including COVID-19) made online tutoring one the most suitable solutions especially for those who try to stay safe. Despite all this crazy stuff that still keeps happening in politics and the healthcare system, many folks still keep on learning or tutoring on the Internet.  

Let’s talk about the highs and lows of teaching from home over the Internet. Let’s go over some advantages and disadvantages of online teaching. We’ll cover some common challenges people face once they decide to teach online.

Why Teach Online From Home?

In the past, whenever someone decided to share their knowledge and earn an additional income, the first thing that would come to mind is to turn to tutoring.  With tutoring, you can easily pass the knowledge onto someone else, right?  Well, today this works just the same way. General principles of tutoring didn’t change, except for technology that has evolved and now you get to teach people online.

There are two most common types of online tutoring:

• Synchronous – real-time face-to-face interaction that takes place online.
• Asynchronous –  providing learning content through recorded sessions or other types of online courses.

These are various online teaching jobs:

• College-level online teaching faculty
• School-level online teachers
• Online English teachers
• Online tutors
• Course developers
• Instructional designers (ID)
• Subject experts

Teaching online from home seems a lot easier since all learning resources are available at all times on your laptop or computer. Plus, there are a whole bunch of eLearning marketplaces and sites you can collaborate with today.

If you think you already have enough students and just want to stick to independent tutoring, then make a wide net of students. Of course, the tricky part here is that in the current circumstances of pandemic and lockdowns, it’s much harder to get new learners coming in.

Teaching online is not a drab subject anymore. But this approach becomes a lot more challenging since teaching requires us to stay in touch with technologies. Online teachers connect with students now over laptops, tablets, mobile phones, or other devices. Technologies wipe out all these age limits whenever it comes down to online education, which is great. Consequently, a great demand for tutors who teach online is growing fast.

The Highs and Lows of Teaching From Afar

A good online tutor should be able to provide all necessary qualities to keep students engaged in the process of learning. Basically, your online learners should feel like you both are going through this learning journey together. 

Just like in traditional teaching, online tutoring requires a fair amount of determination and enthusiasm.  It is important to show a heart-warming attitude towards students, so they know that they’ve got this important feedback whenever they need to.

There is no real secret to success and every tutor gets his highs and lows once and awhile. Obviously, success in teaching online is the result of hard work, preparation, and learning from your mistakes. But more importantly, love what you’re doing! And you’ll  open lots of doors to endless opportunities. A good example would be an online course creator, Rob Percival. He makes millions of dollars teaching courses on web development and website creation. Rob gained his popularity through excellent feedback that was given to him by his students from all over the world.

Anyways, here is a quick list of some crucial teaching skills you should concentrate on:

• Communication
• Listening ability
• Flexibility in providing feedback
• Up-to-date course structure
• The ability to motivate students and engage them in online sessions
• The ability to deploy resources is highly important

The student-centered approach is probably the most important one. This approach is listening to the needs of the student and reacting accordingly. By breaking a complex problem into pieces and learning each part using a different technique, problem-solving, repetition, etc. Don’t be afraid of experimenting! Be creative, think hard what else you can bring on the table to motivate online learners.

The Challenges of Teaching Online For Money

Yes, the Covid-19 situation made online education or remote learning almost a ubiquity. Online or distance learning is not a new concept altogether, but the sudden shift from traditional to online learning has created a sense of unpreparedness. As remote learning solely depends upon mobile technologies and mobile devices used or deployed by educational organizations to the students, this shapes numerous challenges for teachers as well as students.

Online learning provides many benefits to the students allowing them to learn flexibly both in and beyond the classroom boundaries. However, there are some implicit challenges or problems that are faced by teachers. 

Here are some common problems pertaining to online teaching and the use of mobile technology:

• Device compliance
• Technological problems
• Misuse of devices
• Loss of devices and data
• Educational data security risks
• Distractions and unproductive use of devices
• Collaboration issues

Statistics show that today the number of people who never tried online tutoring is constantly growing. Although it seems like a pretty novice way of teaching to many, most people have never given it a shot. One reason is that we already have witnessed many success stories of teaching online even without a degree.  

Okay, wonder what is the main challenge of online teaching? Actually, according to what many online instructors said the biggest challenge is in the struggle of becoming fully comfortable with putting their voice and face “out there”.

There is still some misconstrument that teaching online is all about grading assignments, exams, etc. Online teaching is much more than that. If you want to build an effective online course, then you’ll need to connect with students on a regular basis. You’ll have to establish communication even though you may never actually meet any of them in person. For example, posting an audio or video chat might help you to overcome reluctance for public speaking, if you have this kind of problem.

Another big challenge of teaching online from home is ensuring that your instructions and directions were understood correctly. Since you’re not physically present in class, sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the students got everything cleared up or not. This can result in exchanging a bunch of emails back and forth. Not to mention annoying time delays in responses. Very frustrating.

How To Start Teaching Online

Although online tutoring is rewarding, it demands a great deal of hard work. If you like helping others to learn, online tutoring could become your earning ticket. So, what exactly is needed to start teaching online?

First, sit down and draft a list of skills which you know the best. Then use this list for brainstorming and come up with the concept of your future online classes.

Brush up on those skills which you’re going to use. Before you start offering knowledge to the world, you might want to polish them a bit. 

Find an online tutoring platform on which you’ll offer your classes. Luckily, there’s a whole variety of them out there, so you don’t have to worry about whether or not you’ll find the right one for you. Some of the most popular eLearning marketplaces are definitely Coursera, Grinfer, Zeqr, SkillShare. They have their similarities, but also differences, so it’s important to go through them carefully and choose which one would be the best fit.

Register on an eLearning site and create a class. Once you’ve picked out the tutoring platform, set up an account and start building your very first class. It might take some time to get students. But be patient and don’t give up!

Top eLearning Platforms For Teaching Online

Obviously, a great alternate option to tutoring online independently is to join the eLearning platforms, teach online and get paid. One of the major goodies of collaboration with such eLearning sites is being taken care of in terms of marketing and promotion of any educational services that you provide. 

For example, if you wish to get paid through 1-1 online consultations, then register on such a popular eLearning platform like Grinfer and start teaching students for a set fee. This platform will assign those online learners who have picked you in accordance with your profile, expertise, and schedule.

A list of top eLearning platforms for teaching online:

Transtutor – created specifically for assisting online tutors to find jobs. It has become one of the largest teacher-student faster panels. There are over 20,000 teachers registered on this learning platform who teach and get paid.

Tutorvista – one of the best sites created for providing for those who teach online from home. This marketplace works with tutors with solid experience in such subjects like math, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. There is no sign-up fee and they’ll start charging you only after you start teaching.

Sophia – available to anybody who creates a free “lesson packet” on nearly any topic. It will provide you with a variety of slideshows, videos, audio clips, etc. Once your lesson is published, this platform will encourage learners to view it through an attached Q&A board. Each lesson is evaluated by subject experts and gets rated by other users or tutors who have a degree in your field. Basically, everything gets reviewed to sort out good material from the noise.

Learnable – lets teachers put together an entire online course rather than a single lesson packet. This eLearning platform was spun off from a resource created for hosting forums, blogs, as well as online courses that teach web development. Just register and start creating a course by bundling articles, documents, and videos into consecutive online lessons.

Udemy – one of the largest and most popular learning platforms available now on the Internet with millions of users. This marketplace offers video tutorials and video courses online and has been rated as one of the best sites for both online learners and online instructors. Provides an excellent opportunity to online instructors for earning passive income. You can easily build courses by combining video, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, audio content, zip files, and also host live sessions.

Grinfer – online learning marketplace allows you to come as close as you can get to meeting an online instructor in person with 1-1 consultations. Once you decide to go with 1-1 consultations, set up your schedule. The platform will show your availability to users in the calendar.

Also, this eLearning platform provides tons of online courses and real-time features to enhance the learning experience. If you’re an expert in anything from science to wellness & beauty, you can convert your knowledge into cash with Grinfer. Or you can earn extra money in your spare time as a tutor. All you need is to register (no starting fees involved) and provide your expertise by either submitting online courses or registering as an online consultant.  

Grinfer supports both newbies, as well as experienced tutors. Even if you’ve never tried online teaching before, you get a chance to become one of the best tutors who teach online today! Join Grinfer today and start earning money!

Conclusion

Today, anyone with good knowledge can be a highly demanded online teacher or an online coach. Many people do teach online without a degree because knowledge is all that really matters. However, you can start working much more effectively if you keep on gaining sufficient teaching experience and will never stop learning yourself. So, keep on advancing your knowledge on different novice approaches in teaching.   

Online learning has the advantage of permitting tutors to concentrate on online studies. An online teacher can demonstrate who he’s been working with previously and compose a drawing in the future learning experience. This can open up additional opportunities for direct collaboration.

The online space takes into account the incorporation of creative advances like video conferencing, movement and storyboarding, web journals, and internet-based life, games, and worldwide points of view. At this point, online teachers are liberated to be inventive with new learning encounters.