How to Start Online School in 2021
Originally published at How to Start Online School
The power of the Internet and technologies is great in the educational industry. It provides a chance to create the required content and engage a huge market audience. If you start school online now, you will reach more potential learners tomorrow and achieve success throughout the time.
What is Online School?
Some people still wonder about what online school is. This is a type of education through digital channels in the virtual platform. That is why the term virtual school is also popular among the people in this industry. The greatest advantage of online school is that all these virtual classes are taken online and both teacher and students may join from anywhere.
Online schooling is preferable for the students for whom traditional learning is not a good fit, for instance:
- learners who like the flexible scheduling
- previously homeschooled students
- students who prefer personalized education
- people who look for new challenges
- advanced learners
- career-focused students
- students struggling to overcome learning difficulties
- people with health issues
Why Start Online Schooling?
As you have already found out, one of the reasons to choose virtual schooling is the demand. Many people prefer online over traditional learning.
People seek to learn online as:
- There is no time or distance limitations
- No kind of fixed age for learning
- Flexible scheduling
- Convenience both for teacher and learners
- No obligation, independence on choosing subject matters, the industry, and even the teacher
Starting your online school in 2021, you may start your own online business — a really exciting journey to help others and be appreciated in turn.
How to Start Online School
No matter your industry or specialty, you may always share your knowledge and experience with people. Starting an online school is very easy with the development of technologies and people who prefer online services. Online courses are very effective in the current times and it adds on the benefits engaging more learners. Now let’s go on and discuss what you need to do to start your online school.
Step #1 Choose Your Business Model
Online teaching is an eLearning business and you should choose its model in advance. This will help to identify the way your school makes money.
Here you may have a few options:
Membership. In this option, you offer your services for a period of time. Students need to choose a plan and make payment. Then they will have access to the material for a specific time you offer. It may be a monthly or yearly membership plan.
Along with the standard plans, you may make some special offers, sales, and similar exclusive options to engage more people and extend your audience. All the students need is to learn how to sign up for online school and choose a pricing plan to subscribe to.
Individual Class Payment. For this offer, your students need to pay for every single lesson. So, they may stop it any time just not paying for the next class. This is especially effective for beginner teachers. In this way, people won’t worry about paying a significant amount of money. They pay only for a single private lesson. If they don’t like they stop. Such an approach decreases the risk to a minimum. Once you get a reputation and people know you are a qualified specialist, you may go onto other models if you find it appropriate.
This version is also effective for online courses. Students pay for a video course and it is always available for them as far as the teacher runs the platform.
Certificate Monetization. Some platforms help to offer free teaching services. Students pass the courses but in order to get a certificate of completion, they need to make a payment.
Step #2 Choose Your Niche and Subject or Topic
One of the most critical points in online teaching is choosing your niche. This is the field you are experienced in and would like to share your skills. Besides, the topic you choose should also be required in the market. Whether you choose to be a yoga trainer, language teacher, marketing consultant, or online business coach, your courses should be in demand in order to engage the audience and provide income.
By choosing a specific niche, you make a distinction and stand out among the competitors, narrowing down your audience. If you are specialized in a chosen niche, people tend to trust you more as they feel you own more detailed knowledge and are a master in that specific sphere.
Before making the final decision make sure to implement detailed research of the market. Learn the complexity and competition in the sphere. Know the available courses that are the same or similar to what you teach. Clearly imagine how difficult it will be to gain students in the field you are going to choose.
A specific subject or topic is also advantageous in regard to the fact that you offer a course in a niche that is not so much present in the market. Accordingly, the competition is not so high and your courses will become popular more easily.
Step #3 Make Content Plans and Prepare the Educational Material
The next critical point is creating a content plan. This helps to make the process more specific and manage it effectively. You may write down your lesson plan, any stage of the process, and write a description for each stage. In this way, you manage the time and also try to keep the focus on the most important points.
For online classes, this is especially important for timing. You schedule classes and it won’t be professional if the second class is delayed as you haven’t take into account the time the first class will take.
Planning is a good point also for training videos. You divide the whole topic into smaller chapters and different video topics in each chapter. You are highly recommended to make notes on every video so that you don’t miss any important points.
Chapters and a large topic divided into several videos increase your online course engagement and help to gain more learners.
In the process of making plans and preparation for the online school, you may use some tools such as Trello, Excel, Google Sheets, Google Slides, etc. If there are some pieces of additional material like SlideShare presentations, pdf files, and so on, you should make them in advance so that attach them immediately.
Make sure you record the video courses in advance as well so that you may immediately publish them as soon as you have a website and there will be no need to wait then.
Step #4 Create Your Website
Creating a website is like starting a new brand if you start a personal website. This is a good choice for an online school. You may worry about the price of the website. I know it’s really expensive but here you have another offer — a cheaper and equally productive website. This is possible to get through Uteach.
Uteach is effective as it is a website builder specialized for the educational industry and offers advanced features to provide e-teaching services. You will need a few minutes to create your website through this platform. It will let you organize the teaching process:
- Conduct live lessons
- Sell online courses
- Come up with quizzes (tests)
- Present educational content through blog articles
- Give certificates
This educational website builder will help to create a website with a custom domain, design, and preferable features. It becomes your personal onlineschool brand. Here you don’t need to worry about answering a lot of questions like “When does online school start?”, “When is online school starting?”, “What time does online school start?”.
Once you create a lesson, the registered student gets email notifications about the class. You also have a chance to invite new students just by adding their email addresses to the invitation list. All you need to think about is how long does it take to build a school. And the answer is more than satisfying. You create the website within a few minutes. Of course, you may spend some time testing different visual elements or textual content to find the best that fits your brand.
Step #5 Publish the Prepared Material
Having your website launched, you should immediately publish the educational material:
- create live lesson schedules,
- upload video courses,
- organize quizzes,
- share some useful and engaging content on the blog, and so on.
Make your services available for the learners as soon as possible. In this way, you increase the speed of the process and get closer to real results sooner earning profit online.
Step #6 Build an Audience
While creating your content plan and educational material, you have already shaped the image of your target audience. This is an important point as you should know them well in order to meet their requirements.
Knowing the preferences and behavior of the audience will help you to reach them as you will identify channels or platforms where they are more likely to spend time. Usually, you may find learners in social media channels, forums, discussion boards, groups, and similar platforms.
In order to build an audience, you should be active in similar platforms and increase your brand awareness. Sharing some tips or pieces of advice with people may be an effective tactic to create an image of yourself as an education provider in your specific niche.
You may create some useful pdf files and offer them with subscription pop-up modules. People who are interested in getting these informative files should give their email addresses. In this way, you reach people who are interested in your specific educational niche.
Step #7 Advertise and Promote
If you have already started schooling and want to proudly exclaim “I have my school online”, then you should be patient and work hard in order to reach the maximum level of potential success. In this stage, you should continuously advertise on different platforms and let people aware of your classes, upcoming courses, webinars, or any kind of event.
In this regard, you are highly recommended to advertise on social media platforms (choose the ones your target audience is more likely to be found at), search engines, related websites, etc. Try email marketing. From time to time send engaging emails to your subscribers Include your platform links wherever possible and drive traffic to your website. Accordingly, these visitors may become loyal followers and why not students.
Final Notes
Starting an online business is a productive way of earning income and sharing required knowledge. It takes time, energy, and effort, but if you do it in the right way, you’ll get the results.
As an online education provider (regardless of your niche) you get a chance to earn a significant amount of income, offering your teaching services. Technologies work for this. Don’t miss your chance, get started today with Uteach.
