Teacherjames.com is a online english tutoring and TOEFL/TOEIC/GRE prep website that is already active and generating revenue/profits.
We currently have 200 teachers and over 100 students registered on our site with more added each day and month. Our teachers live all over the world (US, New Zealand, Australia, UK, China, Taiwan, etc.) Our students are mostly in Taiwan, but we trying to expand into China as well.
Our teachers teach using video webcam in an online classroom that allows for MS Word, MS Excel, JPEG, SWF, and also “screenshare” capabilities. And each class is recorded for future review for the student.
This is an American registered company with a registered Taiwan branch company. We’re looking for enthusiastic partners to work with in Taiwan to expand the company vision.
We don’t need funding (though funding options are always welcome), but we need entrepruenerial minds and spirits.
Salary and ownership in the company are part of the compensation package.
Please browse our website and contact us if you’re interested in more information.
So…20% of your charges up front for allowing you to use the video teaching interface and sending you money through PayPal. And “most of our teachers are willing to give a free hour lesson”??? More like 10 minutes, tops. And that would be in an exceptional case. And your claim will tend to make the experienced teachers – the ones who have no need to give demos – look un-helpful compared to the newbies, who need to give demos.
Plus US$10 a month in addition? And the student accounts are only free for a limited time? I can see EITHER a commission system OR a monthly charge system, but not both.
Nothing like getting paid by all parties concerned, though, is there?
Thanks for looking at our site. I wanted to address a few things you mentioned.
There’s no 20% “up front”. Teachers can charge whatever they want and as long as the student agrees to it, that’s their rate. It’s just like private tutoring. We take 20% of the fee to facilitate handling the site, providing the online classroom, and handling all the billing. Teachers who use the free “Teacher James Profile” pay nothing until they get paid for a lesson.
Most teachers are willing to do a free lesson (30 minutes to an hour). This is common in private tutoring as well. If you meet with someone as a potential student, you rarely just talk 10 minutes and go. You need at least 10 minutes to talk about times, setup of the course, materials, etc. When I was teaching English, I would offer a one hour free demo so the student could see my English teaching abilities as well as my accent. Maybe your experiences are different?
Not sure what you mean by “our claim will tend to make the experienced teachers…look un-helpful compared to the newbies.” All of our teachers fill out their profiles which includes where they are from, major, education, speciality in teaching, and also a brief, written bio (professor profiles come with a 30 second intro video that a teacher can display accent and personality). Students can browse and view these at their leisure and also see how many lessons that teacher has taught using our system as well as how other students have rated those teachers. All of these factors should allow the student to make an educated guess on how well they think the teacher will be. Then of course, they can ask the teacher if they will give a demo and then make a decision then.
US$10 a month is only for Professor Profiles (which includes among other things the video profile as well as many pre-made worksheets, flashcards, etc. for them to use in their lessons). Teachers can sign up for a free account and teach as well. There’s no money commitment up front to be either a teacher or a student.
Student accounts are free for a limited time. I don’t see why that’s a big deal. Guests can even browse all of our teacher databases without setting up an account. The only time you need an account is when you want to contact a teacher.
Professor Profile members choose that plan over the regular, free Teacher James plan. It has a lot of added value that the regular one doesn’t. But you can teach and make money with either plan.
Our vision is to allow better teachers access to students who need it. And allow students the ability to choose between a wide range of teachers. Maybe a student is an engineer who needs help for their work. Then they can find an engineer in the US who just happens to teach on our site to make some extra spending dollars. That would really benefit the student, who needs help with specific engineering vocabulary. This would be really hard before to find, but with our site, you can browse through the teacher backgrounds and find someone who fits your needs, your time, and your rates.
Thanks again for taking the time to look at our site. Feel free to email me with anything.
Hi,
Thanks for answering.
I still have some concerns, frankly.
The site should really be in Unicode instead of BIG5-- many characters are garbled when viewing with Firefox. It took me three tries to get them all to display.
I am not convinced as a qualified native speaking teacher of English that this site stands to do me any service. The first page of teachers that come up are almost all either a) non-native speakers or b) located in India or similar. The highest income “bracket” is US$21 and over…not exactly in line with the advertising in the OP. To attract quality teachers (if you care) I would advise having searches NOT inquire about pricing, then offer the ability to order search results by “price: highest to lowest”, “price: lowest to highest”, “distance” or whatever (think EBay’s results display; it seems to work.) There’s no incentive for me as an experienced native speaking teacher with very strong qualifications to go on this network, as I would not have any way of standing out on qualifications – which should be possible if quality is the first consideration.
The search parameters seem to be aimed to prefer 18-35 year old teachers, which most people wouldn’t notice or bother to change. Please consider changing to something more inclusive so that specific user action will limit the pool but the pool will not be limited by default – start with 18-99 and let the user narrow the range if too many results are returned. (Providing better targeting by other search options will reduce the original set of results returned, of course.)
There should also be more qualifications available to search on, such as MA and Ph.D degrees, and specializations, rather than just TEFL qualifications. Consider something like “MA in Teaching”, “MA in Specific Field”, “Ph.D. in Teaching”, “Ph.D. in specific field”, etc. For Taiwanese students, qualifications such as having taught in a national university or a well-known school would also be attractive. I’d suggest a keyword search capability on a keyword field for teachers to fill in. If you really want to help students find a precise match as to expertise or similar, the parameters you give to search on are not very helpful. How would your example engineering student find his or her engineer? Keywords.
I see no search parameter for “native speaker of English”, nor for years of teaching experience, nor for video, face-to-face or both/either. I would also recommend having one for the “Chinese ability” of the teacher. Some students want and/or need a teacher who can speak Chinese, and getting a non-native speaker is not the only option.
I really do think that charging BOTH a monthly fee AND a commission is a bit much – 20% of fees should be enough, particularly for the higher-tier teachers from whom a 20% bite will bring in more revenue anyway.
Since there are presently more teachers than students registered, frankly, you don’t have a strong bargaining position to attract top teachers (if that’s what you’re really trying to do) at the present moment. I would suggest thinking about offering some incentives to good native-speaking teachers while you’re offering freebies to students. In the long run, it would serve you to build up a large number of high-charging teachers who teach regularly. 20% of NT$1000 an hour is better than 20% of NT$100 an hour, after all.
It’s also not immediately clear which color (white or green) represents times when the teacher is available to teacher. A caption would make that display much clearer to the casual user.
I’d think seriously about video downloads of taught lessons, too. In a copyright-casual place like Taiwan, why would I teach one student when I can figure that s/he will share the lesson with 10 friends for free? It’s too easy to do that with downloadable IPod compatible video.
It would also be AWFULLY nice not to perpetrate the idea that the proper form of address for teachers in English is “Teacher + first name”…I suppose it’s too late now with the business name, but it really makes me ill to see teachers registering that way as well.
Just some thoughts. It’s not a bad idea but if you want to sell to teachers you need to show them that you’re giving them something as well, and thinking from their perspective. Unless you only want to attract newbies, you need beef up the professionalism of the selection criteria IMHO so that those with qualifications can be showcased based on them. Otherwise it becomes a fashion show.
Ah. Never mind. Here’s the money quote, from the “Terms and Conditions” for teacher sign-up:
So, under these terms, the teacher doesn’t even own his own work jointly with the site; it’s exclusively the property of the site. And I think we know that in Taiwan, that means derivative works galore. A short and glorious career for teachers compared to the benefit to be accrued by the company by obtaining teaching performances free (in fact, the teachers pay a commission to provide these recorded lessons to the site.)
Now there’s a business plan.
Perhaps re-working the OP might be in order: Wanted: teachers to pay us 80% of their fees for teaching online and incidentally to create a huge amount of teaching material for our future use for free.
Thanks for your in-depth suggestions. Some of them are very valuable and we will take them into consideration.
As for video downloading, it is not possible. The recordings for future use are FLASH based and cannot be downloaded. They can only be viewed using a web browser. A student could in theory give their username and password to 10 friends so that they can view a lesson, but their friends would only be able to “view” the recorded lesson and not participate. To us, it’s much more beneficial to allow a student to watch their recorded lessons for review than deter a student from sharing it with 10 friends.
As for Teacher James owning the material on the site, one reason for that is so that we can show the recorded lessons to teachers and students without having to ask the teacher and student to sign release waivers. We’ve never re-sold and re-packaged recorded lessons for general public use. If we do repackage something (in the future), we will definitely contact, notify, and compensate the teacher accordingly. The only recorded packages that we’ve sold so far are TOEFL prep packages that we made jointly with the teacher.
[quote=“teacherjames.com”]Thanks for your in-depth suggestions. Some of them are very valuable and we will take them into consideration.
As for video downloading, it is not possible. The recordings for future use are FLASH based and cannot be downloaded. They can only be viewed using a web browser. A student could in theory give their username and password to 10 friends so that they can view a lesson, but their friends would only be able to “view” the recorded lesson and not participate. To us, it’s much more beneficial to allow a student to watch their recorded lessons for review than deter a student from sharing it with 10 friends.[/quote]
Um…actually it is possible. Not only possible, but easy, in fact. It’s also “not possible” to download RealAudio files, but that too can be done easily. Took me less than 30 seconds to Google and find software that would fit the bill for downloading Flash movie files.
Well, that’s not what the site says, and it is not what teachers are required to agree with when they sign up. Your legal language is worded so as to give you the right to re-sell ALL the material on the site, and to own it outright – not even co-ownership with the author/creator. That would make it illegal for the teacher to use his or her own material after teaching it on your site. “So far” is great, but I wish I had a nickel for every company (especially Web-based) that change their terms and conditions. And, you’ll note, the only requirement for you to change the terms and conditions is notification to users.
If you only want usage rights, then state that, or include ONLY language that states signing up for an account means that you allow your image and recordings to be shown in such-and-such a way only, and limit (or eliminate!) the scope of the copyright-related language on the conditions page. For someone who is involved in a copyright-related issue involving a family member (I won’t say anything else or it would “out” you, which is against the rules at Forumosa.com, but I’m sure you know which case I’m talking about) the way the site is worded at present shows very little sensitivity to other people’s copyrights and the potential use of their images.
Have you ever scolded a Taiwanese student? They just bow their heads until you’re good and done. It’s cultural, and it works. In fact, it’s a good strategy for anyone to adopt. (Really.) Avoids a lot of conflict.
Anyway, I’m not “toasting” anyone. He asked. But copyright in teaching materials is a major issue IMHO for folks teaching in Taiwan as native speakers. The “specialness” of being a native speaker is something that can be sold in two ways: through the accuracy of your materials, and the perfect accent and usage in your actual teaching. Both of those are being taken over for possible future use by the site as a condition of teaching there. If the OP does not resell the outstanding material thus donated to the site, I would say that was underutilizing a business opportunity from his perspective as a site owner, not a teacher. He’s trying to run a business, after all, and is not himself primarily a teacher, so the principle of “buy low, sell high” holds. His job is to look after his interests to make money, while the job of the teachers is to look after their own interests to make money; the two sets of interests may intersect to some degree, but they are not identical. No big surprise there.
The scope of the copyright language in the agreement really does not seem accidental. It’s carefully crafted by someone. Maybe it was copied from another site or something, but in any event, it is there and it is in effect. Moreover, those hoping to earn “$30-$50” an hour teaching online will definitely have to write in their amounts (which is possible) as the drop-down menu goes only to $25 an hour. I rather suspect the bulk of the working teachers on the site are going to end up being in the US$12-$15 an hour range, and those who put up profiles seeking more lucrative work will end up helping to sell the site but maybe not getting that much work, at least as things are currently structured.
If I were going to teach online, this site seems well-organized for the most part, the design is nice, and the concept is well-conceived. The fees can be argued back and forth. But the copyright conditions are just not acceptable IMHO for anyone who views his teaching as anything more than a way to while away an hour. I might be interested in teaching online, but not for a monthly fee plus a commission plus losing copyright in every word I uttered and everything I produced to do so.
Maybe some sort of “Gold Club” setup for crazy teachers who charge the big bucks and don’t want to surrender their copyright?
[quote=“ironlady”]Have you ever scolded a Taiwanese student? They just bow their heads until you’re good and done. It’s cultural, and it works. In fact, it’s a good strategy for anyone to adopt. (Really.) Avoids a lot of conflict.
[/quote]
Interesting that you say that, and whilst I don’t teach, try scolding someone of Chinese origin who is older / more experienced than you. Even constructive criticism risks an enemy for life.
[quote=“Tyc00n”][quote=“ironlady”]Have you ever scolded a Taiwanese student? They just bow their heads until you’re good and done. It’s cultural, and it works. In fact, it’s a good strategy for anyone to adopt. (Really.) Avoids a lot of conflict.
[/quote]
Interesting that you say that, and whilst I don’t teach, try scolding someone of Chinese origin who is older / more experienced than you. Even constructive criticism risks an enemy for life.[/quote]
I meant that the “just drop your head and let them yell all they want, and don’t bother to answer back” strategy is not a bad one for anyone to adopt in many instances.
Anyway, I’m saying the reaction of the OP is most likely coming from the same place that makes students just “wait” until the teacher is done yelling at them. (In this case, I’m not scolding someone older than I am, and I’m not scolding someone more experienced (in teaching) than I am, anyway. Actually I’m not scolding anyone, but you get the picture.)
As far as the “scolding comment”, while I get the intent of what Ironlady was saying, I thought it was a little distasteful…but I appreciate that everyone has their own style of writing and commenting especially in a forum setting. I didn’t personally take offense to it, but I can see how it might be intepreted the wrong way.
The reason I originally posted this topic was to see if there were people who were interested in joining our team. I think that we have a good idea, and we have a good start to our business. In no way is our site perfect or even close to being 100% finished. We are continuing to improve and revise the site everday. Suggestions and feedback are of the utmost importance to us. And of course, we need good people and smart ideas to make our company grow.
It’s very apparent that Ironlady has gone through our site in great detail and has brought up many good points (such as expanding our search parameters, gearing our membership packages to be more teacher friendly, and of course the legal terms). So I say thanks to you for doing that. We’re just starting out and none of this is “set in stone” for us. The 20% fee for teachers might be too high, but we need to get more feedback before we change that figure to a better number. Right now, with a limited amount of teachers teaching we do need to cover our overhead fees and maintain the online classroom. With more people using the site, we may be able to lower that percentage fee.
Also, with our system, we are offering a way that “non traditional” teachers like nurses, lawyers, engineers, or other professionals in US and around the world who ordinarily don’t have the opportunity to make additional money by teaching to students located in Taiwan and China to have this ability to teach a little and make side capital away from their professional day jobs. I’m not sure exactly how well our system lends itself to more traditional ESL or private tutors who are located in Taiwan or China that have options to teach at “bu-shi-bans”, and don’t have to give up 20% (or whatever number we may change it to). The best advantage we give those teachers are the convenience of teaching from home and not worrying about transportation costs and time.
Regarding the legal terms, Ironlady is correct. We used a fairly “blanket” terms and agreement sheet that a legal associate of mine provided to us. It wasn’t specifically catered to our site, and it might be “overprotective”. However, when we started a few months ago, it was important in our eyes to be overprotected in our legal terms rather be unprotected. The use case we thought of was a teacher teaching something illegal or improper in their class and then redistributing that link to students either on or off TeacherJames. This might open us to liabilities to that student, so we stuck with the legal framework that prohibited teachers from re-using the lessons that they taught on our system.
And to be sure, we did think of the future business model of reselling a package of recorded lessons, but we want to set up that feature within each teacher’s profile…as in, teachers would be able to control which lessons, packages they have “for sale” or “for rent”. They could also add in stuff like worksheets geared for that lesson or audio files, etc. They could monitor how many times they are sold or rented and track it in their account pages. We would have a standard percentage fee for this feature (or maybe it would come with the Professor monthly package). Teachers could also offer a 10 minute “free look” at the lessons they sell/rent. Teachers who offer other things with their package (like built in worksheets, etc.) we could change the standard percentage fees for. But, this takes a lot of time to plan and program so the legal terms weren’t altered for them back then because it wasn’t ready.
Right now though, we are at a point to act on expansion ideas like this so as we introduce these features, we will also modify our terms of agreement.
Anyways, thanks again for the comments on this thread as we have been taking notes and discussing them. A couple people have emailed me about partnership inquiries so thanks for that too.
(Edit: Teacher James posted his reply while I was writing mine. Sorry!)
I’m with IL on this one.
You’ve never done it before? Well I’ve never propositioned any of my teen students, but to guard against the possibility that someone might do so at some point there are legal safeguards and codes of practise in place to protect everyone concerned. If you have the right to do something you may choose to exercise that right in future. If you have no intention of exercising that right, then why not change your terms so that they reflect the concerns of your users? In the modern world I have nothing of value except myself and my ideas. Neither does anyone else. Letting you own that is a very bad idea.
To quote the sage, “it’s all about the SunYatSens”, we’re doing this for money. If you’re going to claim the value we create then we don’t want to work with you. Simply change your terms and conditions so that it’s clear that the teacher owns the material they create and teach unless you pay them for it. That’s how the world usually works, and it seems odd that you’re insisting it should be otherwise.
What’s wrong with asking people for a waiver? You’re asking teachers to waive their rights when they sign up, why not just do it when you want to use their work? Are you going to be routinely showing every lesson to students? This sounds fishy, and if your intentions are good then why not reassure people by addressing this serious concern?
Why not add an archive function to enable teachers to save any lessons they feel good about? If they so wish. Allow teachers to link to their archive - call it a portfolio - from their profiles, and the problem goes away. Except that the teacher continues to own their work and you don’t. If you insist on owning it then you’re not going to attract a lot of quality material. Quality costs.
Profiles
Students have funny ideas about what constitutes good teaching. Simply putting teachers into a bidding war to give the customer what the customer thinks he wants is not a good idea. Where is the space for teachers to sell themselves? Where do you explain to the students what you can do that justifies charging more money? Where does the teacher go to add value, instead of trying to do the same as the next guy for less money?
Students need to understand that the most important thing is to get the basics right, which requires a decent teacher, instead of looking for the cheapest dude with the ‘right’ accent. All the profiles I looked at featured teachers claiming to focus on accent and pronunciation. This is what students think they need, but they can’t even begin most of the tasks in the TOEFL test. If you educate your customer, by providing some kind of knowledge base that is actually useful, then maybe they will see the value on offer instead of just looking for the cheapest yankee.
The little bio’s are too short and too hidden. There aren’t enough search fields. And, as usual, you have people who specialise in everything. Any teacher who claims he can teach anything to anybody is lying. You don’t even ask for years of relevant experience.
General
On that basis, why not start by changing the name of the business to reflect what actual English teachers do?
As Ironlady pointed out, nobody in the English-speaking world addresses anybody as teacher. Let’s start at the beginning and establish ourselves as people who teach authentic English instead of Chinglish garbage. Then we can talk about the price.
About demos: I used to give free demos to people who had contacted me for free. Some people seemed to spend all their free time having free demos from different teachers, and never actually paid for a class. I still spend an hour or so with new students for free, but they pay money to MYU to get my contact details, so I know they have some level of commitment. I recommend you do implement something similar to weed out the timewasters.
Maybe you do this already, but wading through your FAQs to ofind out was a bit too much. The most obvious question I had, which was not answered was “what is TeacherJames?” I suggest adding a simple explanation of how your site works before the FAQs. Forumosa has a long and a short version of the rules. It’s a good approach.
Since you’re not creating a syllabus or teaching the classes, or controlling in any way at all what the teachers teach the students, why are you limiting yourself to North American ways of doing things and to test prep? Why not appeal to a wider market?
Have you ever heard of IELTS? Probably not, because you obviously subscribe to the belief that all Taiwanese want to go to America. More students went to the UK last year than the USA, and almost as many went to Australia or to other EU countries. American English is not the default world standard, and it wouldn’t matter if it was. Students will always speak with Taiwanese accents, the difference between the various flavours of English is tiny, and teachers’ accents don’t matter.
Money
It takes time and energy to create and maintain a profile. How do I know I’ll get a return on my investment? What are you doing to market the site? In what way are you preferable to TutorABC, or whatever it’s called? Why should I try and become a top teacher on your site instead of on theirs?
Also, I have no interest in earning US$'s. I’m not American, have no interests in the USA, and with the US economy going down the pan I’d rather be paid in some currency I can use. YOU might think the greenback is the world currency, but to a lot of people it’s not. Assuming that everyone wants to do their transactions in your money is simply excluding them. People hate transaction fees and exchange rate losses too.
Paypal? Why do I need to get a paypal account? What is this ‘check’ malarkey? Just put the money in my bank account, or hold it on deposit until I ask for it. It should all be automated, so there wouldn’t be any more work for you. But do it in Taiwan.
Collect the money in TW$. Pay the money in TW$. Or give people the option. MAKE IT EASY TO GET PAID!
And, at the very least, get rid of those drop-down menus for the money fields. Don’t limit people. Let them make their own choices. I looked and simply thought there was no point in me using your site because there is no option for me to charge enough money to make it worthwhile.
This site is mired in ‘old economy’ thinking, the sort of stuff that is killing Taiwan. We’re in the new economy now, “Teacher James”, it’s all about being better and offering more value. Knowledge. Skill. Creativity. These are the keywords. Cheap shouldn’t have to be part of the equation. Knowledge economy, not cut-price replication. Quality, not price. Right now you’re trying to define what people do and what they get paid, and trying to own it all for good measure too. The successful sites are the ones that don’t try to control people.
The internet is all about empowering individuals. If you want me to use your site then you need to make it possible for me to advertise what I do, not what you think people want. You need to make it possible for me to emphasise what I think is important, not what you think is important. You need to enable me to charge whatever I can get, not what you think I should charge. And you need to stop thinking you can own my intellectual property. It’s mine, it’s all I’ve got, I’ll decide what it’s worth, you can’t have it, and your job is to enable me to advertise and deliver it. Do that and you may have a workable business model. Try to keep control and you’re wasting your time and money.
Hope this helps. The tone may sound a little hostile, but that’s just me being grumpy. There’s a huge future in this sort of thing, and I’m very interested in what you’re doing. But right now it stinks of rigid thinking and preconceived ideas.
I would really like to hear from some trusted Forumosans who have actually used this service, got paid, and are happy with the results.
I have had enough of schools stealing my worksheets, recordings, and taking pictures of me without paying me. I tell them now that if they want to use my handsome face or lovely voice as part of their marketing or curriculum, they must talk to my agent.
I think TeacheJames is a good idea and in the future it might be a valuable resource for students and teachers alike, but I tend to agree with ironlady and loretta. That, and it doesn’t seem to work well on Safari 3 with Macs.
Good luck to you, Damon. Hope it works out! Keep us posted.
After talking it over, we’re gonna implement the changes in the terms and conditions by end of this week on our site. We’re still figuring out the exact wording, but it will be more reflective of the concerns that have been posted on this thread. Thanks everyone for their input.
Also, quite a few people have emailed me now about joint ventures with their own websites or their own teacher training companies. We’re working through all of the possible partnerships, and if it’s okay with the moderators, I’d like to announce them here on this thread as we finalize them. I think people might be interested in seeing and discussing how these joint partnerships might work (either for Teacher James or for their own online businesses).
And same goes with our business plan as well. Many people have emailed asking to see our business plan. We are undergoing a general overhaul of our business plan (last one we did was way back when the site wasn’t build yet) and should be done within the next couple of weeks. Several people have expressed interest in angel/private financing, and we are open to a new round of funding. I don’t want to say any specific numbers in a public forum, but if you email/PM me I can share with you our business plan and our goals of fundraising.
Finally, I’m going to ask some of the teachers who have taught a lot of courses to post their experiences on this site. I don’t know if they are Forumosa members or not, but hopefully they can give some personal insight to how they like/dislike using Teacher James.
You might like to alter your signature line (and the advertising you use all over the Internet) to reflect that the average pay rate on your site is not $25 to $50. It is misleading as it currently stands.
Why on earth would lawyers, engineers or other professionals in the US want to “make side capital” at 80% of whatever Taiwanese students will pay EFL teachers?
Also, why is the name of the site such terrible Engrish? Yeah, “James老師” sounds okay in Chinese, but “teacher James” sounds just as weird to an English speaker as “lawyer James” or “computer programmer James” would. Don’t you want to promote the kind of usage that would be found in actual English speaking populations?
On the good side, though, the basic idea of teaching online in video is a good one. This site seems a little bit like what’s happening on a larger scale at 88groups. Good luck with it.
Just addressing some of the questions and comments before:
Yeah, that’s a good idea. It goes along with our idea of creating an addition to each Teacher’s page that allows them to sell for download or online viewing previously taught videos. They would have access to selecting which ones they want to showcase, etc. And some teachers may even combine a previously recorded class with a set of worksheets, tests, and the offer to grade those worksheets and tests by email each week. That could be a “package” deal where the student essentially pays for a recorded viewing and graded worksheets from the teacher. And all revenues from this are split between Teacher and Teacher James.
For the free “Teacher James” package where it’s completely free to sign up, teachers fill out the search details about themselves and also have a bio section to describe their background.
For the $10US “Professor James” package, they can upload a short video clip introducing themselves (personality and accent) and also be a FEATURED TEACHER in our Study Hall section on the front page of the website.
Previously on the thread there was the discussion about why we are charging 20% for the fees and then a $10US monthly fee. From my point of view, the 20% teaching fee (some can argue too high) is for hosting the online service that teachers use to teach and the basic package of hosting each teacher’s profile page and also creating a common place on the web where students can find a lot of teachers at the same time. 20% saves the teacher on transportation time and costs and also perhaps a headache of trying to find a cafe or a quiet area to teach a private class.
The $10US monthly fee is to attract more students. It’s hosting the video clip that allows for a teacher to stand out. Nothing like going to a teacher page and seeing exactly how they speak (accent and grammar) while also getting a peek at their personality. Also, we showcase their special classes in The Study Hall on the front page. There are some other small perks for the Professor package (like the Teacher’s Lounge) but really the 20% is for hosting the teaching costs and the $10US is for attracting new students. I see it as two different things.
Completely agree. We’re looking at partnering with some companies who do standardized tests. Teachers can voluntarily take these tests and become “certified” through whichever test they take. Then we can put that on their profile page somewhere prominently so that students can see they passed this or that test. We can also link to a sample copy of the test so students can see for themselves what the test consists of.
Right now, we just started and want to attract a lot of students so student registration is free. Later on, it will be a one time fee of $10US for a student to register. That way they have to pay out some money in order to contact a teacher. Students will still be able to browse and search for teachers, but they won’t be able to contact or private message a teacher until they pay the registration fee, showing some form of commitment. * This one time $10 is already posted on our site with a “limited time free” next to the student registration.
I don’t think we are limiting ourselves. We’re targeting anyone who wants to learn English for any reason. If you’re referencing the fact that we are only offering TOEFL / TOEIC / GRE on the website (and currently only TOEFL classes), that’s because we haven’t found an IELTS teacher yet who wants to start a class. If you are a teacher and have experience teaching for the IELTS test, please contact me and we can talk about creating your own class.
Yes.
Nope, don’t subscribe to that.
We don’t guarantee you will get classes if you create a profile. We just allow you to create a profile, and then it’s up to you to keep it up to date.
We are marketing online and are looking at magazine ads. In addition, for our TOEFL / TOEIC / GRE / IELTS or any speciality prep class we will buy separate online marketing to just promote them. Plus, if you click on the TOEFL link on the home page, you can see that we created a special page just for one of teachers and we host a 30 minute demo video from his class.
We are going out to companies trying to sell them on the “professional teacher” package where we match up an professional engineer with a Taiwanese engineering company, etc. Once we sell the company on the package, then we search through our own search engine to find comparable teachers with that professional background. If we can’t find one, then we do recruiting in the US or other English speaking countries (this is still a work in progress, but we are currently teaching Taiwanese companies and we do our own search engine to find the teachers for them…and when classes do open up for a company, I send out a mass email to all the teachers offering the class).
Will address this later, but that’s one reason why we wanted to call the site something different…like Teacher James.
Nope, don’t think that way at all. The reason we use US is because the initial company is a registered US company, and we’re more familiar with US law and taxes. We’re researching ways to pay out teachers in their own currency, but that research wasn’t the most important for us when developing the site. We launched the site because we were excited to see it happen. We’re slowly changing and modifying it to make it better.
That’s been changed. That was an oversight error. Why would we want to lock teachers into rates under $25? But to be fair, “other” was listed right after $25 and it was clear that you could write in your own amount.
Actually, we allow you to teach whenever you want to whoever you want (you agree to teach a student), charge as high as you want, and now we’re altering the language in the terms and conditions about ownership. Other online sites (like ones already mentioned) employ teachers, schedule them to teach at specific times, send them a pre-packaged Powerpoint presentation which they cannot deviate from, and pay them a fixed salary. Plus most of them don’t allow you to choose your own teacher through a search engine.
Yeah, I use a Mac as well. I’m lobbying to address the Mac Safari compatibility issue as fast as we can.
I never said average pay rate. But I will change it to say “up to $25-$50/hr”.
I have a Taiwanese friend who works at an Taiwanese engineering company that just hired a local English Bu-Shi-Ban (very reputable chain) to bring in an English teacher to teach them “business conversation” english. Each class is between 2-4 students and meets two times a week. They pay the teacher 1800NT an hour (for 45 minutes of teacher with 15 minute break) which doesn’t include any of the teaching materials. The teacher has a business background, not an engineering background.
I also have many friends who have made between 1000NT and 1500NT teaching varying levels of business english or medical english.
1000NT to 1800NT is around $30US and $55US. Taking out our 20% that’s an hourly rate of $24 to $44/hr for the teacher. Now, like I mentioned before, we are actively trying to find companies who need professional teachers. And if we find one and then offer it to a teacher overseas (or even in Taiwan/China for that matter), then they can potentially have a part-time income without having to apply for jobs or market themselves outside of creating their profile. And, it’s flexible and they teach from home which should be pretty convenient. Now, who would do that?
A. 1st year MBA, Nursing, Law, Medical, Architectural, etc. graduates who don’t have their licenses yet (aren’t making the big bucks) and want to supplement some income.
B. Professionals who are either in between work or out of work and are waiting for the next opportunity in their field. This is a way they can make better money than most part-time jobs.
C. Professionals who have want to make some contacts in Asia. They teach the students and get to know comparable people in their fields around the world. This could lead to friends, business contacts, or other opportunities.
D. Grad school students in any of the professional fields. They haven’t gotten their degrees yet, and could stand to make some extra income.
We didn’t want to name it like “tutorabc”, “liveabc”, “onlinetutor”, “englishschool”, “englishtown” because we wouldn’t stand out. We named it Teacher James because we have also taught in the Chinese bu-shi-bans before, and to us, it was kinda affectionate when the little kids called you “Teacher Andy” “Teacher Jennifer” “Teacher Amy”, etc. We like our name and think that it stands out and is easy to remember.
“Teacher James” isn’t grammatically incorrect, and in older generations, they used to call their teachers by “teacher” and first name. I’m not sure that it’s “engrish” per se.
Also, our customer base are the students who pay for the lessons. If they are used to calling their teachers by “Teacher Sam” or “Teacher Annie”, we think Teacher James is something that they can remember.
And from conversations with my students, one main reason they call their teachers by their first name is because often it’s hard to pronounce a teacher’s last name. Or it’s hard to remember it. So calling teachers by first name is an easier way to remember for the student.
We didn’t want to name it like “tutorabc”, “liveabc”, “onlinetutor”, “englishschool”, “englishtown” because we wouldn’t stand out. We named it Teacher James because we have also taught in the Chinese bu-shi-bans before, and to us, it was kinda affectionate when the little kids called you “Teacher Andy” “Teacher Jennifer” “Teacher Amy”, etc. We like our name and think that it stands out and is easy to remember.
“Teacher James” isn’t grammatically incorrect, and in older generations, they used to call their teachers by “teacher” and first name. I’m not sure that it’s “engrish” per se.
Also, our customer base are the students who pay for the lessons. If they are used to calling their teachers by “Teacher Sam” or “Teacher Annie”, we think Teacher James is something that they can remember.
And from conversations with my students, one main reason they call their teachers by their first name is because often it’s hard to pronounce a teacher’s last name. Or it’s hard to remember it. So calling teachers by first name is an easier way to remember for the student.[/quote]
Sorry, but “Teacher James” is Engrish of the worst sort, on a par with folks believing that “Wellcome” is spelled with two "L"s because that’s what they constantly see in the street.
I could argue that it’s easier for me to call all my Chinese acquaintances “Mr. Bai”, but that doesn’t mean I will win friends and impress people in Taiwan by doing that – and that’s why I would be learning Chinese. You are doing students a disservice by perpetuating a myth that ALL teachers in the US (for example) go by their first names with their students, or that “Teacher + firstname” is an acceptable form of address.
The whole point of students seeking out qualified – preferably native speaker or at least culturally savvy non-native-speaker – teachers is to get accurate information about language usage. Otherwise, there’s no advantage. And your site comes off looking kinda stupid if the teachers teaching through it have to explain to the students that the site name is incorrect usage, doesn’t it? (I’m sure that film school might be a bit more casual than some academic environments in terms of how professors are addressed, but you won’t get far going to study abroad in Britain and trying to call your professor 'Joe" or “Teacher Joe” the first day because “his last name is too hard to remember”. Language learning actually has a lot to do with, um, learning to remember words that were originally strange to you.)
Standing out is great, but wouldn’t it be nice to stand out for accuracy? That would be enough of a cachet in Taiwan to differentiate your site, believe me…
