January 3, 2008 21:10
Category: Writing
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Is online teaching really relevant? Let me try an example.
Let's say you're looking for an answer to what ingredients you must add to your fish preparation in order to taste it oriental. When you do that it is pretty likely you already know quite a bit about it. And you're just curious to know if there can be some better ways.
Guess what? More often than not, as you juggle to squeeze out free time to search an elusive answer online, you come to realize you know much better than what the search engines' top result pages (SERPs) tell you.
That is not surprising because search engines are yet to gauge your level of intelligence so as to offer just what you want. Perhaps that is good, for do we, the humans, like our lives to become that cozy..?
Coming to 'dumb' search results, does it at times cross your mind that perhaps you'll do better than most, teaching online say how some of the best fish preparations can be cooked with minimum fuss?
If it does, it's only natural. Because you're one of those persons who have a passion to do his/her job right every time.
But I am not going to extol the virtues of your perfection here. Instead, I'll simply tell you that like any person who teaches in real life, you too can become a teacher online. And if you do, you may make fabulous money than you ever thought possible.
The main reason why online teaching - or e-teaching if you prefer - has a huge earning potential is that most people want immediate solutions to their problems, which is not available in the books the way they want, and they are ready to pay you reasonably good money if you tell them how. Let me give some examples.
In my work as moderating this blog, I've come across many visitors who want quick solutions to their SEM (search engine marketing) woes. Often their problems are one-liners like 'how to increase clickthroughs in my AdWords ads', or 'which affiliate programs will fetch more income', and suchlike.
In most cases the solutions are not straightforward, and need elaboration. For example, to increase AdWords clickthroughs will involve many actions as against the inquirer's likely assumption that just one step or 2 are all to achieve results.
Now here comes the puzzle. You may wonder why the visitor cannot buy a book on AdWords? There are very good books out there - those by Perry Marshal and Andrew Goodman among others - that are lucid and can make even a beginner understand the nuances in a short time.
The reality is the visitor is not looking for a book to find the answer. Even if he has one of the books free of cost delivered to him instantly, he is still unlikely to read it to find the solution to his problem. This is the case with majority of people.
These are the persons who are looking for solutions that are shorn of 'unnecessary' details, are straight to the point, and can deliver them the solution in the least possible time.
If that is true, which solution do you think can effectively address this need of knowledge?
The answer is online teaching, which can be designed by bringing together a series of lean and trim audio/video/text lessons that directly addresses the core problem without much ado.
Taking the example of AdWords as above, there can be an online teaching program on increasing clickthroughs, another on writing ads, yet another on tracking conversions, and so on.
This means just AdWords can generate quite a few e-teaching lessons, which can be offered as separate modules or together as a comprehensive course. The learners will decide which ones they want to learn for their needs.
Once you understand the basic premise of online teaching, it will not surprise you that there can be any number of lessons/courses that can be thought of.
Tell you what? Some day in the future there perhaps will be a watchdog that will grade the e-teaching courses, so that the learners know which are better, which are not.
Okay, where do you start then? To tell about me, I'm learning the tips and tricks of starting an online teaching course for the last 2 months, and I must say it is an excellent value for the price I've paid. What about you?
