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Get In Gear For Zoom Online Teaching

The April 9, 2020 issue of Forbes Magazine predicted careers will change as a result of Covid-19. Information Technology Companies have been offering their products at a discount, competing for customers because of the sheer volume of startups. Now you can teach independently and affordably get in gear by following these six steps for professional online classes. First, let me tell you my background.

My story began in 2007 as a videographer, documenting our school’s information session at Goldman Sachs in New York.

“What? The alumni worked eighty-plus-hour weeks!”

That wasn’t for me, so I started teaching English in an Asian country.

The Challenge

After three years our University’s Moodle system crashed. In 2013 my winter vacation was used to create a teacher-to-student interactive platform. I want to share these easy steps so that others can make a smooth transition as an independent teacher or tutor professional with little investment—and it’s not expensive!

Besides a good running computer and fast connection, you should have the following gear:

  1. A Hosting service
  2. Domain Name
  3. Content Management System (CMS)
  4. User Interface / User Experience Enhancement
  5. Video Editing Software
  6. Home Recording Studio

 

As a bonus, receive a grade book and multiple-choice game for free. See details here.

To whom do I speak? I’m talking to the teacher with no web development experience, a person with a Foursquare or Wix static website who wants a domain transfer to a self-hosting site. 

The above gear represents an investment of around 4-$800. As an employee of an online tutoring service, you could be paying that amount each month for marketing and administration. You have the opportunity to offset a high expense with a small investment by running your professional service. That opportunity is the subject of another article. For now, let’s get started with the first step, a website host.

Selecting A Host

In my search for a Hosting service, I immediately remembered Go Daddy from the Super Bowl commercials. That hosting service didn’t work for me in Asia and neither did Host Gator. Site Ground; however, had an Asian hub and I’ve been happy ever since.

A website host is where you get a domain name to develop a site from Installation to Live Site. The host also has a control panel or cPanel with a scrolling page of unfamiliar tools. It’s within the cPanel that you create basic elements like a database, a user, subdomain, and email. A few hosting companies like Siteground have developed a more robust, user-friendly control panel.

Moving Forward

There are two ways to create a domain name like DMS English News. Companies use their multi-million-dollar brand name as their domain. But for most of us, we just type a name in to see if the domain is available. If you’re not worried about SEO or generating free traffic to your site, this method will be fine. The second way is to research with Google Keyword Planner.

Next, you need a Content Management System. These are free applications on your hosting company’s cPanel like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and Drupal to name a few. Although WordPress is very popular, in 2013 I was looking beyond what WordPress had to offer. Since then, Joomla and WordPress have proved to be like the DSLR and Mirrorless Cameras respectively because WordPress has added more features in the last few years. Drupal is like the DSLR with a 1000X telescoping lens. So Joomla suited me just fine.

Having Fun

Joomla has extensions (extensions.joomla.com). Extensions (custom code) are what makes Joomla so flexible and thereby popular for developers. Extensions are like the mom-and-pop shops in digital space but there is a transformation taking place. Like the Walmart stores overtaking mom-and-pops, this transformation includes User Interface / User Experience (UI/UX). SP Pagebuilder from Joomshaper is one of the most exciting UI/UX enhancements and it makes website development fun.

UI/UX is how websites will be developed moving forward, it’s designed to give users an experience. Many of the common extensions found on Joomla’s extension site are represented as addons with SP Pagebuilder, so you may offset the cost of several paid extensions with Joomshaper.

The pagebuilder for WordPress is called Elementor which works just the same.

Soon, I’ll be documenting the installment of UI/UX using Joomla (I must confess though, WordPress is a much easier way to go).

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