I have been often asked, "How can I teach online?" I even made a short one hour course on how to teach online, a personal one on one session. But after a year or so of teaching it to many students, I felt I wasn’t reaching enough people.
So, I have decided to write in detail about how to teach online for beginners. This post is not an end in itself but can serve as a great starting point for freshers in the field of online teaching. I also believe there are tutors who know much more than me about online tutoring and have much to add to what’s written here. If you find anything that can be improved, please comment at the end of the post. I would be more than happy to incorporate changes which can provide value to the community.

 

Introduction

Online teaching enables travel-free education for both students and tutors. As most of our tutors already know they can teach students from overseas from their home itself. It helps both students and teachers to reach across the globe and find the right person at the right price which is not always possible in face to face tutoring.

Tools for online voice/video calling (VOIP)

Skype

Skype is one of the most awesome tools which you can use to talk and teach. It’s free and has better sound quality than most other tools, paid or free. Video quality is again better than most other options. The fact that Microsoft bought it for a whopping $8.5b just adds to the charm of using it. You can also share your screen using Skype. When sharing screen, you can only show your screen and not give control to the other person. For giving control, we can use other tools which would be discussed later.

 

Among other features, Skype has a powerful app gallery which makes working with it just so much better. idroo is one of these apps (discussed later). In most cases, however, you don't need any extra apps. With skype, you can also transfer files and take a screenshot of the shared video. And the best thing about using Skype – if you ask someone for their Skype id, there is little chance they will say “What? What?” You really don’t need any other tool for audio if you have Skype.

 

You can use other free tools such as Google Talk in case Skype isn't available. However, they are not as good as Skype. Therefore I am going to skip them in my post.