If you were still resisting technology in TEFL
… just wait till you read this:
” Many teachers are charging as little as 50 ITC (about US$5) per hour for private 1-on-1 language instruction”
Well, that’s me convinced. I always thought that the problem with TEFL was that we got paid too much for working too few hours.
www.italki.com are the ones boasting of that (in a PR release email to language teachers such as me!), so please contact them if you are feeling guilty about only having to teach 30 contact hours or so to keep the wolf from the door at the moment, or would like to understand sweatshop and sexline workers more by having the same working conditions.
April 1st, 2009 at 2:27 am
Thanks for writing about italki and thanks for the opportunity to better explain the goals of our language marketplace.
Simply put, our goal is to match up teachers and students online. Teachers are free to set their own prices at the level they think is right. Students can choose a teacher based on their experience, or academic qualifications, or teaching style, or lesson price, or whatever criteria they deem most important. Teachers can set a price based on demand for the language they teach and their own economic expectations.
On italki, we have created two categories for teachers. Language Tutors are people who have proficiency in a language but are not professionals. Professional Teachers, on the other hand, have degrees in education and teaching experience. Professional teachers should be able to receive higher prices since they are able to deliver a structured learning environment and a superior learning experience.
One objective we hope to achieve with the language marketplace is giving students that previously could not get language instruction the opportunity to learn. We believe there is a lot of demand for language instruction that isn’t being met due to geography — and this is a problem the internet was meant to solve. If you live in a major metropolitan area, perhaps it is easy to find (as an example) an Arabic school or instructor. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many areas of the world. This problem becomes more pronounced the less popular a language is. However, there are many teachers of these languages, located in their home country. For some developing countries, teaching their native language online can potentially generate significant income.
Geography also plays a role for popular languages. From our user data, English is clearly the language most in demand. There are many people in Europe, Japan, and other countries that are interested in getting tutoring from native English-speaking teachers. We think the economics of this will become even more favorable once we have a solution for one-to-many classes.
The other half of the equation is teachers. We believe teachers benefit from being able to teach at their own convenience, and from being able to find students. It is important to note, that since a teacher can teach directly to students, both teachers and students do not have to support a large administration infrastructure. This should result in both higher returns for teachers, and lower costs for students.
italki.com is a young startup, and our language marketplace feature has only just been launched. We share many of your concerns, and a marketplace that does not satisfy a teacher’s economic needs or a student’s need for quality education — clearly is of no benefit to anyone. We’re actively studying how to make our marketplace better for both teachers and students. We appreciate you letting us respond, and we’re happy to continue this dialogue and get your feedback. We’ll do our best to evolve the site for the benefit of everyone.
The italki Team
April 1st, 2009 at 4:33 am
I should perhaps point out that I emailed italki with the link to this post asking them if they had an answer, and this is their email reply that I asked them to also post here