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Alicorn comments on Teaching English in Shanghai - Less Wrong
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I wonder why I hear about people moving to teach English but not doing it remotely. My sister took Japanese lessons over Skype (I don't know if she still does); do people in Shanghai not have Skype or what?
You can't be a respectable government-funded prison for children and use unconventional methods of teaching at the same time.
Surely there are adult students of English?
Surely, but from what little I know of Shanghai the inference that going out and learning English on your own without spending great effort towards keeping this secret is a bad idea or discourage wouldn't be such a far-fetched one.
So in terms of numbers, the public school students that have to learn English at school would greatly outnumber the individual adults who just want to learn English but can't do it without a teacher of some kind.
I also suspect that the latter would not be counted as a "demand for personnel", and that most of it would happen in the shadows such that we'd be unlikely to hear about it.
Given the (apparent) desire for Shanghaiese to keep it secret, wouldn't an at-home method of learning English (e.g. over Skype) be perfect?
Probably. I'm not sure how large a market it is, though.
The obvious problem is that of finding teachers, or for teachers to find students. A large public website might attract too much government attention. Word-of-mouth friend-knows-someone methods alone sound like each case would be isolated, and so we probably wouldn't hear about it.
Host it off-shore. Hell, you can even live in another country while teaching Chinese people English. I've heard of people who do that, though it's harder to make a living that way than teaching in person.
Remote English teaching site. Looks like they pay $15/hr and you can set your own schedule. Must be in college or a college graduate.
In my experience, people almost never use Skype. They use QQ or other programs.
But efforts to learn a language individually are likely to suffer from a couple disadvantages, relative to being in a class. First, classmates can practice new material on each other. Second, economies of scale apply: It's much more time-consuming for a teacher (and therefore, more expensive for students) to have ten one-on-one lessons than to have a single one-on-ten lesson.
There are some people who offer Skype lessons remotely. Skype lessons generally pay less than in person lessons.