VoIP Lowdown

Gautam posts in The VoIP Weblog that a number of tutoring companies are using VoIP as a tool in their teaching. When it comes to a good soft phone or VoIM (Voice over Instant Messaging) client, you can’t beat it as a teaching aid for remote tutoring. You have voice, text, file sharing, and in the case of some VoIM clients such as AIM Pro (amongst others), desktop application sharing. What’s more, al that functionality is inexpensive or free.

Quite by coincidence, I spoke to someone over the weekend who wants to be a math tutor for one of my web properties. We discussed how we’d go about it. And while I haven’t decided 100%, I’m leaning towards either Ether or a combo of Skype and Jyve. The latter incorporates the Skype soft phone. Ether gives you a free extension, but calls are directed to whatever phone you specify. The same tutor asked me if one of her friends could tutor English the same way. As I have a TESOL certificate, I’m now trying to devise a VoIP-based English study program. (Both are high school students and would teach at a level below their skillset. They already tutor people in person, so doing it online would just be an extension of that.)

If you’re thinking of ways to use VoIP for your teaching, consider the functionality you have at your disposal:

• (1) Free or inexpensive voice calling. Speaks for itself.
• (2) Video calling. Depending on which VoIP or VoIM client you use. (Skype, Sightspeed.)
• (3) Text mode chat. This is a great simultaneous supplement to a voice conversation.
• (4) File sharing. At the end of the lesson, you can send over a PDF file.
• (5) Application sharing. Need to run through a lesson in, say, Powerpoint? Or maybe you are teaching programming and want to share your code editor. It’s great for when voice and text aren’t enough. (Aim Pro.)
• (6) Conferencing. Want to keep costs for students down? Teach in conference mode. Sightspeed has video and voice conferencing. Skype has voice conferencing.
• (7) Language translation. On-the-fly translation hasn’t been perfected yet, but there is an experimental project that comes close. The ULRTMT (Universal Language Real-Time Message Translator) is only for translating text mode chats in Skype. It’s supposedly a bit colloquial in the translation, but it might work for you, for both Roman-letter languages, CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese), amongst others.
• (8) Upfront payment. If you are using Jyve or Ether, you can specify payment upfront, via Paypal. Is this convenient or what? (Hopefully someone will come up with something similar for Sightspeed so that you can use their video-conferencing mode.)

What’s not to like about this method of remote tutoring? It’s free or inexpensive in nearly every functionality you could want. If you can’t teach in person, VoIP and VoIM clients are the next best thing. A general methodology is as follows:

• Use Ether to advertise your availability, or Jyve + Skype’s “presence detection”. This basically means tha when you tell Jyve to indicate that you are available, your Jyve buttons on your website reflect that independently of your Skype availibility status.
• If you are using Ether, your rates are already set and paid for before the call comes through to your regular or VoIP-based phone number. If you’d prefer they use Skype, then Jyve lets you set your rates.
• Review a previous lesson if necessary.
• Conduct your lesson through a combination of the functionalities listed above.
• End the lesson off by sharing a pre-written PDF of the lesson’s salient points.

Use a methodology like this for remote teaching and tutoring, and the value you add for a student will likely keep you very, very busy. Just keep in mind that not all countries have access to Paypal.

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andyhagans :: Feb.10.2007 :: Uncategorized ::