I post here the email which was sent to all teachers to help them increase their course offer … I hope you will find it useful!

Dear Myngle teachers,

As you know, we are developing Myngle as the quality platform where students who are serious about learning a language can learn with the teacher and course best fitting his/her needs.

Just imagine…
you are a student arriving for the first time on Myngle, seriously interested in improving your English. You look for intermediate English courses… and there they are: 192 courses to choose from! Half of which are all named ‘Intermediate courses’, many of them with no more than a title.
How would you choose?

For this reason, we need the effort of all of you teachers, to move to the next step in providing courses that have good content and are sufficiently differentiated amongst each other  to be appealing to a serious  student.

Overall, courses that proved to be useful and appealing to students are:
1.    Complete course for one of the 6 levels (multiple lessons with good content)
2.    Targeted to a specific need (business, test preparation etc.- indicated in the title as well)
3.    Niche course for a specific topic (example: Japanese Art Conversation, Writing Business English letters…)

Especially for new teachers, you have a better chance to be booked if you stand out.

Here below are the guidelines to make you more successful.
Please go through your courses to make sure they all fit:
•    Be selective in your offer, be a specialist the student will choose
In general, something targeted exactly to a specific need is preferred to a generic offer.
o    Offer 1 or 2 languages maximum
Although you see that teachers who have been in Myngle for long time offer more languages, now that the offer of teachers is wider, students often prefer a ‘specialist’ in one language when they choose a new teacher.
o    Limit number of courses offered to 6 - 8 max
Offering many courses does not increase your chance of being chosen, on the contrary, the student does not know what to choose.
In general, the rule is that a user can make a choice between 3-5 different offers.  A student will not read many different course titles, but will select those which stand-out more. Do not try to be everything.
o    Tip: there is interest for business courses and exam preparation. Maybe you want to specialize in this and build courses specifically targeted to this segment.

•    Convey quality of your course to someone seeing it for the first time
Remember: people are willing to pay for something that gives them the desired result.
o    Create an appealing description of what the course offers, be specific, detailed, creative. “This course is for beginners” does not attract interest, does it?
o    Do not lower your prices. Serious students are not buying on price alone. The most successful teachers to date are not the cheapest ones. Many serious students are used to paying EUR 40-50 in the offline world for an hour of private lessons (some even more). Do you think that if they see a lesson for 4-5 Euros (10 times less) they believe it offers quality?
o    Check carefully spelling mistakes. This is your first impression to a new student, your visit card; you want to be perfect here, both in the title and course description.

•    Sell a solution, not just hours
Help students learning, with the longer term result in mind.
o    Build courses of minimum 5 lessons and try to write a complete course plan. Except for conversation courses, a good course should have at least a few lessons. How can the student really learn with only 3 or 4 lessons?  A course of 13 lessons looks strange to students, plus, if a student is serious and wants to book it all at once, he/she cannot.
o    Exception to this are Conversation lessons, these do not require pre-prepared lessons and can be done on ad-hoc basis.
o    Offer and promote packages, also the higher ones. If a student really wants to learn a language, he/she knows that this will require more than just a couple of lessons. Also, you know by experience that starting a language is always exciting, but after a while the excitement diminishes, as it becomes hard work. The student has to pass this middle phase to be able to see results and become excited again about the results he/she is achieving. Help students getting through that.
Most students that passed 30 lessons, continued for many more.
o    Add extra resources.  If you have extra resources, like homework or readings, indicate this in the course (this can be selected in the description of the course). Some students appreciate some extra study to be done in between the classes.

•    Make your courses stand out
Put yourself in the shoes of the student: what is he/she looking for?
o    Do not offer combined courses. They seem generic, and not really targeted to the specific need (example: English for beginners, Intermediate, Advanced; French and English combined course). Make it specific, one course, one objective.
o    Do not upload all shared courses. This will not help you become successful. You can add a shared course or two, but the courses which stand out are your own unique ones. If you are the author of a unique course, chances are you will be more popular among students.
o    Make at least 1 course truly ‘unique’. Choose a topic that is not yet offered, or target a specific need. Special note on this: courses that are truly unique will also be selected to appear in the Top recommended courses.

•    Use specific and creative titles for your courses
Try to make your course stand out. What can a student find in your course that is different from all others out there?
o    Use a very specific functional title.  A page full of English for beginners means that none gets chosen.  If your course is for a specific target group, say it, if it is a specific topic, indicate it in the title. Examples: Arabic for import/export Companies; Learning how to do business in Chinese.
o    Use a creative title. Sometimes people just get attracted to some titles that speak to their imagination. Examples: Get ready for your Shanghai trip in 2 weeks; Impress your friends with your knowledge of Japanese art; Survival in France as an expat.
o    Use the language you are targeting. Example: instead of Arabic beginners for Italians, write it in Italian: Lezioni di Arabo per principianti di lingua Italiana. In this case, also add the description of the course in Italian.

•    Focus on offering Languages only
We know that there is interest for many different topics in education as well as many different types of services, but let’s do the first things first, and do them right. We want to build a brand that stands for quality, we need to be consistent with this. So, please, do not create courses that are not related to languages, in any case, these courses will not be found, as the search function is only for languages.

To conclude, try putting yourself in the shoes of a student, and think what he/she needs. If you were that student landing to the courses’ page or to your own profile, how would you look at it?

We wish to all our teachers and students on Myngle a good learning experience!

Share This

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Myngle News, Teaching a language. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.