I work in marketing, but have a savings goal I want to reach by August and am looking to make use of my spare time in the evenings by teaching on one of those online platforms to make some extra cash.
I am fluent in Chinese, and many many years ago did teach, so I’m not totally inexperienced. I’m a native English speaker from the UK btw.
Is it actually easy to find students on those platforms? I’d imagine competition is fierce.
What could I expect in terms of hourly pay?
Are there any requirements to sign up in terms of education or licenses? I don’t have TEFL or anything like that.
Competition is fierce. The China market for kids WAS huge, esp during the pandemic.
Then good ol Xi took the whole tutoring industry behind the barn and shxx most of it in the head. Since then tons of tutors competing for a much smaller pie. Especially also the last year of the pandemic, too many people willing to teach online for cheap, lowered wages to around $7/hour plus various bonuses. There are jobs with more $ but few, far between and with few hours available. Best of luck!
As if the wealthy elites of China aren’t still getting premium English (and French and Latin) tutoring for their children.
The only thing that policy did was make it illegal for the foreigners to make a living in China/ illegal for average Chinese to get extra education for their average children. But you can bet people with the means to do so know the law doesn’t apply to them. The same would happen in TW (well, it already does — English kindergartens are illegal here, yet you see them actively advertising for them all over the place. Most parents of littles that I know don’t even know their child’s English kindy isn’t legal…)
It’s like how the CCP claims to have eradicated poverty in China. It’s still there, it’s just not legal to talk about it. English language education is still happening in China, it’s just not legal to advertise it or admit to doing it. You can’t prevent people from getting an education, especially not with the tech currently available to us.
As for OP’s question, there are a few online schools out of Korea that were advertising on Indeed for US$35/hr. No idea what their quality is, and it appears you need your own tablet and pen (so you’re looking at an upfront cost to yourself of US$1000+ if you don’t have an iPad and Apple pen), but you could look at that.
If you teach using unique and effective methods, like you genuinely use comprehensible input and you genuinely stick to it and make your learners see the value of your teaching style vs. the kill and drill that is so typical of those platforms, you can make more.
If your background is already in business, focusing on just business English is better than being available to teach “any English”. Thus, you can charge more for your lessons.
It would help if you had a few students already before getting onto the platforms. I know I see “come learn xyz language with me!” people with no reviews on Italki and such and think “next!”, so you might need to get some local TW to take lessons with you through the platform first. This means forfeiting whatever you would have made that the platform charges you, but if it gets you more reviews, it could work to your advantage
In Taiwan, I’ve seen a low of $350 to a high of $600, with few of the latter. $450 seems to be acceptable for someone with little to no experience. Some of those might be online but from the company office.
$600 as the high seems low, though I wouldn’t be surprised. There are plenty of Taiwanese online schools with terrible English on their websites that charge students $800+/hr for English lessons.
And there’s that school that posted about jobs on here a few months back that has a pseudo office inside Taipei 101 that was offering teachers 1200/hr or so for “business English” (not sure if that’s in person or online or 1:1 or group). If that’s what they’re paying their teachers, they’re charging their students more than that.
The bigger issue is convincing someone to pay you more than everyone else is charging. When I meet new potential students, I meet them and we spend an hour or more talking about language goals where I give my pitch on how I teach and answer their questions on language acquisition and why I teach the way I do. At the end, they’re either sold on my reasoning for why I charge what I do and how much more acquisition they’ll get, or they realize they don’t actually care about what I had to say and they just want cheap English classes. But that’s not easy to do online, where you have about 5 seconds to pull someone in.
I’ve mostly been looking on 104 and some FB groups. Those are just the number I see over and over, but for business English you could definitely get more. @meishijia might be able to pull that off, but it’s also a smaller job market.
The problem with the platforms is that competition does seem to be fierce and everyone making money there has a high reputation because they’ve been there for a while and know how to market themselves. It also depends on what we mean by platform, like local or international, and what his work status is and how public he wants to make it that he’s working online.