Interested in Travelling While Teaching Online?
To choose to travel the world was not a decision lightly made. My parents had placed a strong emphasis on education my entire life, and to tell them that I would rather write novels and move around the globe than continue on to a Master’s Degree was akin to throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars onto a flame. Still, I had a very particular vision I felt was my duty to pursue. I had to create a type of novel that made people think globally, place into language the effect of 7 billion people being attached, not to particular nations, but to a greater planet via the Internet. In order to have the experience I needed to carry out my vision, I not only needed to travel, but I also needed to travel in a way that could allow me to know the maximum amount of countries as possible.
I did not choose, at first, to teach online. Teaching online chose me. I had originally tried to move to Portugal (one of my favorite countries), but couldn’t find work due to visa issues and a lack of experience. I then tried Argentina, didn’t end up liking Buenos Aires, travelled to Brazil, and couldn’t find myself wanting to live in Sao Paulo or Rio either. It was around the time that my Couchsurfing host told me to try Florianopolis, in his mind one of the most beautiful cities in Brazil. I also ended up searching, out of curiosity, “teaching English online.”
I found a handful of websites that were looking for teachers who had a TEFL qualification, graduated from any college, and most importantly, had experience speaking certain languages that must have been in demand (Russian for Russian websites, Mandarin for Chinese websites, etc).
They were also looking for people who could connect to their students online and teach them one-on-one. I spoke Spanish fluently and Portuguese to an Intermediate level at the time, so I sent an application to Open English. I landed an interview, made a good impression, and began working with them the moment I moved into my island apartment in Floripa.
The structure of online classes is quite different from physical ones and depends on the learning curriculum of the school (which I assume is the case for physical schools as well). Open English divided its students by their native languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, etc), and then by their level of English (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced). Somewhere between 1 to 10 students would meet the teacher in a virtual classroom. The teacher was expected to conduct the class using the slides on the board, starting with a warm-up, then vocabulary, followed by various games and questions.
Like in any other school, there were many pros and cons for working with Open English. The pay was not exceptional, the class structure had very little room for creativity on the part of the teacher, and the students who often did not know a word of English were paired with more experienced students, making it hard to design a class that would please everyone. At the same time, the beauty of working with any online company is that you are working remotely.
With Open English, I traveled across Latin America, saw fuming volcanoes in the Philippines, made the best friends of my life in Japan, and I earned enough to explore some of the less industrialized parts of the world.
Around 2014, I switched companies and I started working with Learnlight, another virtual company based in Spain. Learnlight’s class structures were very different to Open English’s. With Learnlight, I mostly tutored business professionals who worked at partnered companies, one-on-one, by calling them on the phone. I talked to individuals working at Whirlpool or Disney, from areas as distant from each other as Slovenia, Japan, or Argentina. Since it was one-on-one tutoring, the classes were structured to each individual’s needs. The pay was also a lot better, and so I was able to live in Turkey for a year, Indonesia and Portugal for a few months, and return often to India and the USA.
A few words of advice for those who want to work online:
Hiring can be competitive for online teaching. I have recommended several of my friends to my online companies, and none of them have been accepted. Perhaps, it is because some of them are passport owners from India, and others were not fluent in a language beyond English. The point is that teaching online is a job where companies will hire professionals who best fit their goals and needs.
Do not take a job online if you do not want to spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen. Usually, you can work anywhere from four to eight hours in a shift, so if you are not used to using a computer, it could take a toll. That being said, work hours can usually be decided by you. The minimum amount of time you are usually contracted for is 8-10 hours a week, but I worked for about 30 hours and had no trouble having enough students assigned to me to meet this goal.
The pay is manageable but low. I was paid from 8 to 10 dollars an hour at Open English, with my wage increasing the longer I was employed at the company, and I was paid 10 euros an hour at Learnlight. If you work hard, it is possible to make around a thousand dollars a month, or perhaps more in some cases.
Contracts are usually not time-specific, and so your commitment can be flexible. You can always quit if you feel like the work is not for you.
The job is good for short-term goals, but maybe not for long-term ones. Like with general ESL (English As a Second Language) roles, the pay is not exceptional, and there is no real room for advancement within the profession, so use it knowing that it is a means to an end.
I have traveled to over 118 countries over the last four years because I could work online and earned a steady income even if I was spending one week in Lebanon and another week in Oman.
A lot of my time was spent working and not traveling as a tourist, but the fact that I was able to live everywhere and anywhere with ease was its own reward. For all of you who want to travel without a tether, I can’t think of any better way.
- Edited by Radhika Sharma
* This article originally appeared on www.internationalteflacademy.com and is republished with permission.