Skills of An Effective Online Tutor

OVERVIEW | Overview: Online English Tutoring | Why Become an Online English Tutor? |

FINDING STUDENTS | The International Market for Teaching English Online | Where to Find Your ESL Students |

If you plan on tutoring EFL/ESL, or any subject matter, these are some important skills that you will need to have.

Gathering information - the process of researching and gathering lesson plans for classroom use is the same process when teaching online English - only the materials will be tailored to be delivered to an online audience.

Planning - Alot of online tutors work behind the scenes. They evaluate their students learning performance, adjust their teaching curriculum or provide additional exercises to help target weak areas.

Teaching - how do you like to teach? Some online tutors prefer the material laid out before them, with step-by-step teaching instructions, useful teaching tips and optional games and activities. Some tutors like to design their own curriculum, test it, refine it and continue to make improvements to the material. This is an important consideration - it may lead you to apply for work in an organization with established teaching procedures - or to setting up your own online tutoring business.

Organization - as an online tutor much of your time is spent creating new ideas, planning and presenting information in a way that will help your students to learn better. Most of these lessons will be sitting on your computer, so you should feel comfortable working to organize your lessons on your desktop.

Innovation - you will constantly be exposed to new technology and equipment - such as VOIP and web-conferencing. You should enjoy learning and even testing new equipment and ideas.

Empowering - mentoring and coaching of online ESL learners is very important. Sometimes empowering your students can just mean giving words of encouragement every now and than.