Now if you were compiling a short list of careers that would lead you to riches, then it’s very probable that teaching wouldn’t rank highly on them. teachers across the world are generally not driven by money and more by the other rewards that come with a career in education. However the world is changing and the internet is opening up many opportunities for all sorts of career diversification including teachers.
Take for example, a young Portuguese web developer who started posting videos abut programming languages on YouTube. He posted them up as a sort of online virtual notebook, to refresh his memory and keep up to speed with the language he didn’t use much. Yet soon they gathered a bit of a following, an increase in subscribers and soon he was receiving requests to extend the courses and even develop more content.
The young man did his best to add more courses but it wasn’t until he was contacted by the Udemy organisation that he began to consider the possibilities. Udemy broadcast courses in an online environment, one which allows limited interaction, notes and feedback centred around a core video course. In all an ideal environment for broadcasting a web developer course online. Udemy allowed you to charge a fee for the course of which the presenter takes 70% and the company 30% for providing the facilities and customers.
The developer who’s name was Victor quickly expanded his offerings and completed a full course, taking anyone from beginner to a web developer with skills in a variety of languages. The course was initially offered at about 50 bucks but when completed the price was raised to $189 for the 220 individual lessons. Which meant that it was within reach of anyone with an internet connection and a PC/laptop or even a VPN enabled iPad – like this.
In about a year and a half the freelance web developer who was earning about $20000 a year had earned well over four hundred thousand dollars from his online courses. His story is not alone, Udemy is bringing education to the masses and making some teachers with an aptitude for online delivery rather a lot of money at the same time.
It’s a story with very little negatives, education is expanded to anyone with an internet connection across the world. It also drastically reduces the costs for learning new skills – check this out. For educators it also opens up a whole new market at which they can make money from.