Flipped Learning | Part 5: Live English Tutorials Have Been Taking a Piece of Pie
Teaching offline is still huge. It still offers pretty all the benefits. But online teaching is growing quickly, which means there are special opportunities for people who have jumped in. It is the reason why the major reason why online English learning is growing at roughly 14% per year for in Asia and Latin America.
A couple of years ago, the Japanese “eikaiwa” or English conversation class market went through yet another shock. RareJob had about 70,000 students in October of 2012 and grew to over 200,000 by early 2014. At the same time, more and more Japanese students have been joining online learning platforms such as Italki. TutorABC is based in Taiwan and focuses on EFL for Chinese speakers. They have their own system and they have a pretty strong pipeline of students.
Any language school can go out of business or shut down. But things are moving quickly in the online world. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out a few things that aren’t ideal about teaching a foreign language over video chat. It’s a huge, global opportunity but there are some areas where it falls short compared to actually being in a classroom environment.
- Live classes are the trend but it is still not able to meet the demands of the learners to improve all English skills.
- Live classroom can’t give student much chance to practice grammar, writing or even reading skills.
- Fixed schedule with the same teachers in traditional method is still the key to success as it builds the relationship between teachers and students.
So, what is the sustainable e-Learning model? Let’s see it in my next article…
Related posts:
- Part 1: Running an English Language School in Asia, How to Go Sustainable?
- Part 2: The wave of Integration Technology into Classroom
- Part 3: 4 Major Risks in Running an English Language School in Asia
- Part 4: Why the flipped classroom would be the next trend?