Then you obviously won’t have a problem being up front about it by putting it in explicit, contractually binding written terms. 
Then you obviously won’t have a problem being up front about it by putting it in explicit, contractually binding written terms. [/quote]
Get with the program, dude. Teacher James has already said this:[quote]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. [/quote]
No harm in giving a guy a hard time, but you have to recognise when he’s responding.
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. [/quote]
You don’t think that, having paid their ten dollars the students will then try to get as much ‘free’ English as they can? Why not make them pay to contact teachers? It’s a model that works elsewhere, and it’s attractive to teachers even if they don’t get the money. Timewasters are an awful thing.
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. [/quote]
You have 200 teachers, but nobody with any IELTS experience? Where are you getting these people? Do you think it’s possible that someone, for instance like me, could look at your site and assume that it’s not for them because it’s full of Taiwanese English teachers and has the words TOEFL and GRE all over it? If you present yourself as being X then people will treat you as X.
I just looked at your ‘create your profile’ thing, and the questions you ask don’t allow me to differentiate myself from anyone else. There is no field for IELTS (or TOEFL) experience, just ‘test preparation’ in answer to the question about what I want to teach. Wanting to teach is not the same as being able to teach. So for anyone with something to offer there is no way for students to find it.
Presumably, the first person in could become your IELTS specialist. But you only have 100 registered students. If you want someone to develop material for you then they either need to have some assurance that they will have preferential access to a much larger market than that, or else you need to pay them for creating the material. We’re back to the issue of intellectual property having value. Now, if someone is to sit down and create a pile of teaching material for you they need to be adequately rewarded and with such a small number of customers you can’t do that unless you can offer cash up front.
Sorry, but that’s the way it is. If you want to attract a partner on a profit-share basis you need to show a solid marketing plan and budget to make it happen.
Another “red flag” on the registration form is the ability to choose “all” for the “credentials” listed – which are all short-term certificates for the most part (CELTA and others). Nothing wrong with having them – but you would be astounded by the teachers who “have” ALL those credentials. There is a lack of options for really serious creds like MA in TOEFL and so on.
Judging from the teachers that came up when I requested “ALL” the qualifications in a search, you can bet yer bippy there’s no checking the credentials claimed…
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). [/quote]
This sounds good. I’d like to know more about this. Going out and ‘selling’ a value product at the best price you can get, as opposed to passively waiting for students (who then dictate what they want and what the price is) sounds wonderful. Keep talking. Details, man, details! :bravo: :bravo:
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. [/quote]
Er, that’s not very helpful.
The students live in Taiwan and do their shopping in NT$. I live in Taiwan and do my shopping in NT$. Adding in transaction costs, currency fluctuations, and so forth just makes the service unattractive for everybody. Do you want to make yourself unattractive just because you’re more familiar with the laws and taxes of a country that is not really relevant to this transaction? Business is about making things easy for people.
I strongly suggest that finding a way to make this easy for people become the focus of the next phase in your research.
Let me get on my soapbox here. I lived in the USA for several years. I don’t have any hostility to the country or people, but I’m not familiar with or subject to US laws and taxes. I don’t want them to have any bearing on my life. I want my earnings in Taiwan to be subject to Taiwan laws and taxes only, and I don’t want to pay bank/paypal fees just to get the money I’ve earned. Being a US company might work for you, but it doesn’t work for me. You need to work with a local company if necessary to make this work, but if you place barriers in people’s ways then they won’t want to do business with you.
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]
Students are used to producing grammatically incorrect garbage. The job of the teacher is to tell them what is right and help them to break their bad habits. With me, that starts at the first meeting when I explain that ‘teacher’ is not a valid form of address in English and that it’s unacceptable. It sets the tone and serves to highlight the fact that English is different from Chinese. It’s important to get this point across to students to help them understand that all their problems with presentation skills, report writing (ie test prep), conversation, stem from the way they go about things and not simply from their vocabulary.
You are hoping to educate people by pandering to their incorrect preconceptions.
I educate people by telling them that I know more than they do, and that they are paying me for my expertise, so if they want to learn anything they had better stop telling me what they think they need to learn and start listening. You can pay any idiot $500/hr to let you repeat the chinglish you’ve been using since you were five years old, or you can pay me twice that to put a stop to it and help you actually improve. My schedule is full, because I provide value for money. $500 for the same old same old is a waste of $500, and an increasing number of people are aware of that.
Like I said, in the modern economy it’s not enough to repeat the same old rubbish and compete on price. This is the knowledge economy. You get ahead by providing quality and by charging properly for it. Low margin mass-market products have a billion competitors. If you can’t stand out in the marketplace then it doesn’t matter if people remember your name. You’re not going to make any money out of them.
Changing the name, and explaining why, may be a good marketing move. It clearly and publicly disassociates you from the uninformed masses of buxibans that teach bullshit. Why not get some experts to provide you with an endorsement of your decision to do the right thing, and put out a press release?
Not all the students live in Taiwan and not all the teachers live in Taiwan. That’s why it makes it hard to figure out how to set up registration to accurately reflect payment to teachers. The default is something like Paypal, but I realize that Paypal has really high fees. There is a better way, it’s just a matter of finding it. But, currently the default is in place because it works…it’s just not the most efficient.
But…regarding the students and teachers in Taiwan, I can tell you that…right now we have a few teachers that teach a Taiwanese company (who is located about an hour outside Taipei). They pay our Taiwan branch in NT. We give our teachers who are located in Taiwan the option to receive their pay in ATM wire, so it’s set up like what you’re saying. We could (and maybe should) introduce that in our teacher registration…something like, “receive your payment via Paypal, Certified Check, or if you are a Taiwanese bank account holder, receive it in ATM wire (and then keep adding countries and their own systems as we expand)”. Originally our thinking was that we didn’t know the unique systems for each world wide country so we couldn’t list every country out there, but I think listing Paypal, Check, and Taiwan/ATM would be a good solution for now.
Yeah, part of the “partner” or “funding” that I’m looking for (reason why I opened this thread) is to find people who really push the ball in sales. Right now we have a limited sales staff that is going out and trying to get entire companies at time (like the company I described earlier…they were hiring a teacher to travel out from Taipei to go to their company to teach meaning lots of extra costs for the company). We think we have a really good alternative to that at a more affordable price. When we do have openings, I always will send out a email inquiry to the entire teacher list asking if anyone’s interested in teaching this particular course at this time at this rate. And teachers respond to that. Then, we give the company a selection of 3-5 teachers that they demo and then they choose.
We also buy online ads targeting the site, but also sometimes targeting specific teachers (such as our TOEFL or prep teachers). We want to help teachers get as many students as possible. So we spend money not only to maintain the site and to tech support it, but also promoting it and finding students for teachers.
Anyone who’s interested in learning more about a sales position, PLEASE contact me.
Our speciality teachers (for teaching TOEFL / IELTS / GRE / business English / whatever) are all on different compensation terms than the 20% standard fee. They are “specialists” because we talk to them ahead of time and validate their experience and qualifications. Because of that, we cater each package for them different (some packages include pre-recorded material, like you’re saying), and we also negotiate different profit sharing for each teacher.
We work with the teacher for a while beforehand to ask him/her about what they want to teach, how they want to teach it, and what’s the best way to make money doing for the teacher and for us. Then, through part of that package, we’ll figure out (with the teacher) how best to advertise for them and for us. We’ve never asked a teacher to pay for advertising on their own. We always assume the cost of spreading the word of their “speciality” class in our projections. For example, one of our previous packages was set up to where we would advertise for that specific teacher, and then store/host/tech support the recordings. The teacher prepared special material and recordings for this package (so he/she had to commit time to doing this). We decided together on a rate that students would pay to watch each recording, and then we bought ads to promote it. The rate was 60% to the teacher and 40% to us for the first X number of recordings sold and then after that number was met, the rate changed to 40% teacher and 60% us. After setting up the class and recording the material, the teacher didn’t have to “teach” online anymore since it was just a recording…and we handled the rest.
If you are an IELTS specialist, and you are interested in talking to us about setting up a similar course…then please contact me.
The situation mentioned above is what I would call specifically “developing material for us”. Teachers teaching a student in a private lesson isn’t what I would label specifically developing material for us since the teacher is teaching whatever they want and the material may or may not ever be useful to other students later.
I think some would, but most would realize that learning English is a long term thing and they need a long term solution. I mean, some students might take one or two free classes and then not ever take a paid lesson ever…but in my experience, those students wouldn’t have paid money for the classes in the first place. Students who are serious about paying money over a long period of time will not want to waste their time trying to find teachers. Nor will they try and cop a few free English classes. There are always bad apples, but for the most part, students who are serious about learning English and are committed to paying and will pay.
I wanted to comment on this because it underlines a lot of the ideas on this thread.
Mainly that our customers are the students. They pay the money. The teachers help us make the money, but the teachers don’t pay the revenue that comes in. So, we want to make the site useful and friendly for students.
You mentioned that another site online charges students to contact teachers. Well, we have a one time fee because we want as many students as possible to use the site. That site you mention (I believe I know which one you refer to) doesn’t have other revenue models than the paying to contact teachers. And that works great for them. But we want students to keep using our site continuously. The $10 fee is just to “weed” out the browsers. We don’t want to make it so difficult for a student to register and find a teacher on our site (like considering whether or not to pay a fee each time to contact a new teacher) that they ultimately quit and don’t use it. So while a lot of ideas on this thread are mainly based at the “teacher-user” experience (since of course, it’s an English forum with a lot of teachers), our main revenue comes from the “student-user” experience. And we want to make that as easy and simple and successful as possible.
- Also, that’s not to say that we don’t about the teachers at all. I think I’ve shown that we are very open to teacher suggestions and also that we do advertise and try to find students for teachers to teach.
As for: “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.”
My students in China called me ‘Teacher Barbara’. I asked one of them why, and she said their Chinese English teachers had told them ‘Teacher + first name’ was the correct form of address. Since it isn’t, I suggest we not encourage the usage.
It just sounds utterly dorky. Change it to an English-language name, for christ’s sake. Stop looking like a nutter.
EditorSandy
You can say it’s mostly about students as customers, but the minute you fail to keep your teachers happy (feeling that the site offers good value, feeling that the costs are not too high, feeling they are valued as the service providers who make your transactions possible) you will lose them, and end up with a huge pool of low-cost, low-quality teachers of Engrish, and any reputation you’ve managed to build might keep you going for a little while, but in the end you will be no different from everyone else, except no travel.
In particular I would be very careful about letting people claim all sorts of qualifications. It’s just too easy for folks to check all the boxes. Yep, I’ve got this one, this one, this one…heck, all of 'em. It devalues the qualifications. If the company cares, that is. Maybe it doesn’t, since if it’s student-oriented, the concern is to get commissions, and “qualifications” are what most students look for (that, and blue eyes and blond hair.)
[quote=“sandman”]It just sounds utterly dorky. Change it to an English-language name, for christ’s sake. Stop looking like a nutter.
EditorSandy[/quote]
AdministratorAnthony agrees. 
When I’m in the classroom, the students refer to me as Mr. van Dyck or “sir”. Loretta is right - a teacher shouldn’t pander to a student’s misconceptions, and “teacher” is not a valid form of address in English. Suggesting that in older generations “they” used to address their teachers that way is disingenuous.
Agreed.
I don’t hear anyone suggesting that Chinese people be addressed as generations of our forebears may have addressed them…