Sunday, March 8th 2009. A truly historic day for the online education sector. This day will be remembered as the day the first group lesson on Myngle.com took place while on eduFire.com the first participant took part in a lesson from 30.000 feet above the ground!
We are living in great times, no, in important times! Thanks to the internet education can tear down the last barriers and you can be a part of it.
I was honoured to give the first group lesson on Myngle. I invited two of my old clients for a French class and we had lots of fun. So far, so good.
So, how do group lessons on Myngle work? Different to eduFire, the student decides when a group lesson will take place and which topic (language and level) it will cover.
The teacher has now two schedules available in his profile. One for the one-on-one lessons, one for the group lessons. The price for group lessons is the same for all the languages offered by the teacher and is valid for a 45 minute group lesson. It is scheduled by the first student who books in the available schedule of the teacher. On eduFire, the teacher sets up topic, date and time of the class.
When the student booked the class, he is then taken to the payment screen. If he does not pay on time, the lesson will be cancelled by the system. Same procedure like one-on-one lessons.
Up to 4 other students can join the class, following the same procedure.
Group lessons cannot be rescheduled, they can only be cancelled.
The group lesson classroom is the same as for one-on-one lesson. The difference is a link to call all participants via Skype, meaning opening a conference call. The problem I had yesterday was that it did not work because one of the students had an invalid Skype ID. So I had to open a conference call on my own. Well, not a big problem for me but might be for some new teachers.
After the lesson you can give an evaluation for each student and report the no shows.
That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.
My résumé: the booking system works as good as the booking system for single lessons. And this is the important thing. The rest is left to the teacher.
The fact why I am very happy about group lessons on Myngle is simple: Myngle is the only platform with a decent number of paying students. As I said, two students were “old” students that I was able to reactivate this way after the boost. And there is a whole new market segment open for me now, because with group lessons I am able to offer lower prices than usual but in the end gain the same as for one-on-one lessons.
And what happened on the other side of the globe? Jon Bischke CEO of eduFire.com wrote history by being the first attendee of an eduFire class, maybe even of an online class in general, from 30.000 feet above the ground inside a plane. Amazing what technology can do :). I’m excited!