How To Teach Online Classes And Earn Money

Connecting remotely with learners isn’t always easy, and it takes creativity to keep students’ brains stimulated. That is why educators always brainstorm new ideas on how to teach online classes.

In fact, teaching online requires you to have completely different skill sets compared to skills required to teach in-person.

The question most online tutors ask themselves at least once is: How to teach online and make the online learning experience more exciting for my students.

As you landed on this blog, we assume that you are one of those online tutors who need a bit of help to master the skills to excel in online teaching.

What’s stopping you from teaching online?

Maybe you don’t know where to start, or you haven’t found the right platform to teach students online. But we are here to tell you that you don’t need any expensive software and tech to start tutoring online and make money. 

Let’s dive right in to look into different ways to teach students online. Level up your teaching game with these tried and tested techniques.

Who Can Teach Online?

If you are knowledgeable in a particular subject or an area and have the expertise to share with interested learners, you can consider teaching online.

The skills you have acquired would benefit learners who want to master the same, and they might be willing to pay for it. To teach online, you need not have specialization in a school or university level subject, it can even be a skill learners apply at their workplace.

It is as valuable as any degree or certificate course, and you will find plenty of eager learners who would want to acquire the skills you have learned. Your knowledge is valuable no matter how small it is if it has a target audience that demands it. 

Another significant aspect when it comes to teaching online is whether tutors must be specialists or generalists. It is recommended to aim to be more of a specialist than being a generalist. This will help educators to get more student sign-ups and, therefore, more pay. 

Why Should You Teach Online?

When you are starting with anything strategically, like planning on how to teach online courses, begin with the question “why”? Once you decide to earn money by teaching online, you need to determine why you must teach online.

For example, some of the reasons why to teach online might include.

• To reach a more global learner base.
• To connect with students according to their schedules.
• To cut on travel expenses for both teachers and students.
• To leverage the convenience and benefits of online teaching.
• To generate more income.

Reaching through the screen to develop a student community

Online tutoring is remote, but it doesn’t have to be distant. Tutors can foster engagement and cultivate a cohesive group of learners. If you have a strong engagement plan, you can easily win your students’ hearts and minds. If you have been into teaching for a while and now thinking about how to teach online classes, you need to have an engagement strategy in place. 

An engaged audience is an active audience, and cultivating a community of engaged learners must be your ultimate aim if you want to make money with online tutoring. This results in a vibrant online classroom that encourages students to come back for more.

Ultimate Goal: Unmatched learner engagement

If you have already been into teaching for a while and are now planning to shift to online tutoring, you need to have an engagement strategy in place. An engaged audience is an active audience, and cultivating a community of engaged learners must be your ultimate aim if you want to make money with online tutoring. This results in a vibrant online classroom that encourages students to come back for more.

Here are 7 Valuable Tips on How to Teach Online

Tip 1: Choose the right tool

To start teaching online, you will have to find a live streaming solution that connects you with your learners. Luckily, we have a lot of choices available in the market giving us many ways to teach students online. 

The solutions include Skype, Google Hangouts, Zoom, Adobe connect, and more. The interesting part is that most online tools offer many capabilities for free though you might need a paid membership to meet the complete requirements of your students.

No matter what tool you choose, it takes time to master them. View tutorials if required and test the features yourself. Your goal must be to become familiar with solutions to support your learners if they face any difficulties. 

Tip 2: Send invites to students

Once you have decided on the class schedule, send invites and clear instructions to your students. This can be done within your video conferencing solution. The invite you send out must cover a rough plan and joining instructions to students. Before the actual class, make sure you send out notifications to remind them that the class is about to begin.

Tip 3: Set ground rules

A successful online classroom requires a clear set tutoring strategy. Set clear ground rules, set expectations for your learners and encourage them to take your online classroom sessions and their etiquettes seriously. These rules should help to avoid unnecessary interruptions and distractions, ensuring a calm and safe eLearning environment for all students to participate.

Discuss the following etiquette with your learners and make the expectations clear and transparent.

• How should they ask questions?
• Are they supposed to be on “mute” when listening to the class?
• Are they allowed to use the chat function?

Tip 4: Follow microlearning principles

Regardless of how good an online tutor you are, you can only hold a learner’s attention span for a certain amount of time. The attention span varies considerably depending on the age of the students. For example, a 6-year-old can maintain attention to a topic for around 15 minutes. Whereas a 12-year-old can pay attention for around 30 minutes and more. Keep this in mind when creating your lesson plan.

To help your students stay focused and grasp the concepts the right way, follow a microlearning approach. This involves breaking up your content into small sections that can be consumed quickly. Also, try switching the medium whenever possible to foster engagement.

For example, you can introduce a topic, then play a video, ask a few questions before conducting a discussion, and finish with a quiz.

Tip 5: Record your lessons

Recording your online classes is a good habit that is beneficial for several reasons. There will be scenarios where one or more learners are unable to attend. These recordings might also prove to be beneficial when learners want to revise a few topics. Watching the recordings can also help you critique your own teaching approach.

Tip 6: Integrate interactive activities

Everyone learns better when they actively participate in something. Likewise, your students learn best when they actively participate in the learning experience.

Look for ways to integrate interactive activities and review participation to make a note of which ones resonate with your learners. Examples of such activities to boost user engagement can be brainstorm sessions, quizzes, puzzles, games, and more.

Tip 7: Teach a course online along with live sessions

While an obvious way for educators to take classes online is to conduct live sessions with their students, online courses are also great to deliver knowledge online. When conducting classes, make sure you integrate both to reach an audience of varied preferences.

And if you ask us, Google loves online courses to the extent it displays relevant online courses related to a particular keyword. For example, say you want to search for “How to teach online classes”.

How To Make Money Teaching Online Classes?

The rising demand for online tutoring has opened up the increasing availability of opportunities to teach online and earn. While you can make money through online tutoring and sharing your skills, the amount of money you can make might vary based on different factors. 

How much you make from online tutoring totally depends on you. Potentially you can connect with your students in your home country and across the globe as well. 

The following are some of the factors that can influence the amount of revenue you can generate.

• Experience in the subject you specialize
• Valid expertise
• The uniqueness of the subject you teach

Another significant factor is whether you are just beginning to learn how to teach online classes or you are already an established online tutoring brand of your own. If you already enjoy an established presence in the industry, it is easy to start making money from your online tutoring efforts.

But if you are just beginning learning how to teach online lessons, you might take a little more time to start making money, considering the demand for your online classes and the uniqueness of the niche. 

If you can develop an online tutoring site of your own, you can keep all your earnings for yourself and avoid paying off third-party commissions making it easy for you to make more money.

Powerful approaches to make money by teaching online

While online tutoring is a highly profitable market, finding the right ways to make a profit from an online class requires some planning. You need to find the right monetization ideas that suit the nature of your classes, our audience, and a lot of other factors. 

Here are some of the effective ways to make money teaching online.

Monetize Individual Classes

Charging for individual classes is the simplest and easiest way for the students to understand and for you to implement. When students are new to your platform, they find it easy to pay for individual classes, before they are ready to pay recurring fees. If you teach an online class, you can sell the course individually. 

Charge For Membership

When your students love your classes and are convinced that they would gain significant value from your online tutoring website, they would be willing to pay a recurring membership for a class bundle.

Once you have a consistent learner base who signs up often for your online classes, consider offering membership to keep your student base coming back to your site for more learning experiences. 

Offer Classes For Free

You might be wondering how to teach online lessons and make money if you are offering your classes for free. However, this is another powerful monetization strategy especially if you are just starting out and looking to establish a consistent learner base.

When you offer classes for free, you can consider offering certifications for a fee. If you offer the advantage of accessing the courses for free, most of your students would be willing to pay for certificates. 

How To Teach Online Classes From Your Own Tutoring Platform

If you are looking for how to teach online classes, the best bet is to take your classes from your own online tutoring website. When it comes to building your own online tutoring platform, there are 2 main approaches- Building your online tutoring site from scratch and building it using a white label solution. 

Building your online tutoring site from scratch is a traditional method and an effective approach to launch a large-scale learning platform. Not only is this method time-consuming and demands a lot of resources and effort, but it would also cost you a fortune as well. Another best alternative is to create your own personalized live tutoring platform, which is the easiest and most convenient way. 

White label solutions are ready-made scripts available for a reasonable price that allows you to build custom solutions. If you are looking for a professional white label solution to build your own online tutoring website, Pinlearn is the right choice.

The best thing about the solution is that it allows you to personalize the script according to your unique business requirements as you get complete access to the source code. The ready-made solution comes with all essential features that will enable you to run a successful online tutoring site and make money teaching online. If you teach a course online or want to conduct live online classes, the software has got you covered. 

The overall money you have to shell out to build your own online tutoring website depends on the features and functionalities you want to integrate. Considering the cost part, white-label software like Pinlearn is the most affordable and cost-effective solution. 

Conclusion

It doesn’t take long to get started with an online tutoring business. Instead of being in the same room with your students, you reach out and teach them over live videos. You don’t have to be an expert in your field to launch a lucrative online teaching business, but you need to focus on offering the best learning experience to your student base.

As an online tutor, you can leverage multiple ways to make money by delivering online classes to multiple sources and making a living by teaching online from your online tutoring platform. Once you have decided to harness the power of online tutoring, devise the best strategies to deliver online classes to have a positive impact on the learners you serve. 

If you need any assistance in creating your online tutoring website, our team can guide you through the process. Please get in touch with us.