There are a variety of teaching jobs available online for teachers. Whether you are looking to earn some extra income from a side gig or keep yourself busy over the summer — or after retirement — the Internet has got you covered. Here are a few examples of online jobs available for teachers.
Teaching English as a Secondary Language
English as a Second Language, or ESL, tutors often need only be native English speakers with a higher degree in any subject. These jobs are particularly flexible, providing teachers with the freedom of doing them part-time or full-time. Since there is already a good chance that most teachers already have a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree, the requirements to be an online teacher are ideal.
When you teach English online, you mostly deal with students or business professionals from different countries. A good Internet connection and ability to work outside of 9-to-5 in the U.S.A. are therefore paramount when planning to teach online. A webcam and teaching tools like illustration materials such as a whiteboard and puppets are also essential for online teaching.
If you are fluent in a foreign language other than English, there may be additional opportunities available to you as well.
Online Tutoring
Subjects like mathematics, history, and science can be struggling points for many students. Setting up online tutorials for complex formulae or explanations of multifaceted phenomena in science or history could be your at-home dream job.
Most online tutoring jobs only require you to commit to a minimum number of hours to be an active tutor on their platform, so whether to be engaged as a part-time or full-time tutor is totally up to you. A majority of these sites require some education experience. However, most of them do not require you to have a teaching license. A few places will require you to be an MBA holder, Ph.D. professor, or have other levels of similar qualifications. Most of these sites also compensate the teachers better than the sites requiring no qualifications.
Consultant for Homeschool Children
An increasing number of parents are taking their kids to homeschool classes every year. Teachers with experience in creating lesson plans, planning activities, and following a curriculum are highly sought after across the Internet to aid parents who are new to homeschooling to find their feet.
Homeschool consultants must be able to determine a child’s needs as well as their learning style preferences. They need also to be capable of making recommendations, based on their preferred learning styles, on the best curricula for them. Furthermore, a good homeschool consultant must be able to give guidance on issues including character development, how to handle a lack of motivation, writing skills, and organization with school and home.
You can choose to make your homeschool consultancy job seasonal or full-time. Seasonal homeschooling gigs are often available over the summer or at the beginning of the school year. Another perk of these gigs is that you get to dictate your consultation fees.
Creating Online Courses
Creating an online course is an excellent idea if you intend to teach your skill and knowledge in any subject to a broad audience.
As we learned during the pandemic, almost any topic can be taught through online tutorials. Students have the chance to learn through videos and images, which can offer flexibility, the opportunity to learn new things and even additional tutoring when needed.
“How to” courses are usually easy to follow and walk the student through the various steps of achieving the end goal. With some affiliate partners and a bit of promotion, you could end up making much more than the local standard of income for teachers from your course.
Scoring and Evaluating Exams
If you enjoy grading tests, scoring essays, or evaluating exam papers, you are in good luck. A considerable number of schools are outsourcing their work to third-party teachers. Most of the work involves the homework checking and scoring sections.
These gigs are often seasonal in nature, so don’t count on finding full-time, year-round employment in this industry. But scoring does give former teachers who have retired or become stay-at-home moms the opportunity to continue their passion for teaching with flexibility.
Creating Lesson Plans
Most former or current teachers already know too well how to prepare lesson plans. If you spend most of your time building your curriculum for the coming semester/ year, you could turn your old lesson plans, quizzes and tests, slideshows and brochures, games, hands-on activities, and worksheets into money by selling them.
In most online job sites, this position is mostly referred to as curriculum developer or a teaching materials provider. The tasks are, however, still the same: creating worksheets, activity sheets, lesson plans, and other materials required by teachers around the globe.
The payment for this job is often depending on your ability to sell. You could be selling a lesson plan for $1, but if 1,000 people buy it, that’s a good chunk of change!
Textbook Writing
It requires knowledge and research on a topic to be a good textbook writer. As a teacher, you probably have a lot of experience with how textbooks are made, having used them for many years.
Writing spots across the Internet open up regularly from different publishers. They are often work-from-home or remote projects.
Writing Coach
Although this is a very underrated skill set to possess, good writing skills are extremely valuable in just about every industry. Writing abilities are especially crucial when you are eying a managerial position.
You should be highly skilled in writing to be a successful writing coach. The types of writing skills you could be teaching range from the basics of writing a letter, corporate writing, and legal writing, among others.
Writing coaches simply help an individual or individuals enhance their writing skills. They are responsible for helping a client develop a clear and compelling plotline, style, tone, and voice, based on the targeted audience.
Being a writing coach is similar to online tutoring in that you can choose to become a part-time or a full-time writing coach from your own home. Writing coaches can benefit authors, ghostwriters, poets, novelists, and much more. Some coaches charge for their services by the hour. However, many people find it well worth the expense to purchase coaching services for a long time, since writing can take a long time to master and perfect.
Educational Consultant
As an educational consultant, you could work for schools, individuals, textbook publishers, or even institutions of higher learning. An education consultant dabbles in tutoring, counseling, and even homeschooling.
An educational consultant may assess a student’s strengths and weaknesses in academia, developing their new talents and suggesting the best-matched schools for them. As an educational consultant, you would have to know how to create tests that evaluate the students’ aptitudes. You will also need experience in identifying student strengths in various fields.
When an educational consultant is hired by an academic institution, their basic responsibilities are to assess how a student learns and create solutions to problems in the school program. They make sure that the student learning process is smooth as far as the policies and programs of the school are concerned.
Blogging
Have you ever considered blogging as a business? Nowadays, the Internet is full of resources on how to monetize your blog posts. If you possess excellent writing skills, have a creative mind, and have a desire to share something in which you possess excellent knowledge, then starting a blog may be a fantastic opportunity for you to generate supplemental income. You could teach anything in a blog post from how to make a salad to how to fix an electric bicycle motor.
Blogging gives you the freedom to write and advertise your content in the comfort of your home. If you do it right, blogging could earn you more than your monthly income and supplement your salary or pension.
Translating
It is easy for a foreign language teacher to make the move to online translation jobs. Both active and retired teachers can access jobs in this category. You would, however, need to be a native speaker of at least one of the languages you intend to translate. Most sites will offer a sample text for you to translate as a test for your skills.
If you have mastered both languages enough this shouldn’t be a problem, as most of these assignments test basic translation skills. Translators are often paid monthly or weekly according to the number of projects completed.
Writing eBooks
eBook writing is just like blogging. However, while blogging involves publishing one chapter or page on your blog regularly, ebook writing involves publishing all your content in one book and selling it online for money.
If you have a story to tell, a unique voice, or a specialization to share, ebook writing is an excellent option for you. eBooks also provide other channels to make some extra cash. You could turn your ebook into an audiobook or engage in book discussions to expand your earnings.
People on the Internet could also pay you to ghostwrite their ebooks!
The Bottom Line
Although people see teaching as a virtuous profession, you shouldn’t be deterred from earning more money. Many of the jobs I shared above can be a temporary replacement for your source of income during the summer, but some can also be turned into a full-time career.
The sheer amount of work available for teachers on Internet platforms is enormous. These teaching opportunities could be your chance to get the freedom you have been looking for in the workplace. You could build your retirement fund significantly while you work from the convenience of your home.
