Online TEFL Teaching: Neat Possibilities

I recently posted about online teaching: is it a threat to classroom teaching?, and explained why I think it’s not for the time being. But there might just be a couple of interesting implications of online teaching if it were to become more widespread than traditional teaching…

• Teachers could more quickly gain experience working with a wide variety of students – geographic location would certainly pose less of a barrier than it does with classroom teaching . A teacher could potentially be working with students from multiple countries at the same time.
• More technologically inhibited teachers (such as me) would be compelled to learn and deal with new technology, probably to find it’s not actually so difficult.
• It might become easier to match specific student needs to specific teacher skills. In person, you’re generally limited to who is available. Certainly time restraints would still apply with online teaching, but in many ways, the sky would be the limit.
• Students with confidence issues might feel a bit less pressure when they aren’t “on the spot” with a “real” group of people. (However this could be a negative point as they wouldn’t get the in-person practice that they would likely need to use in real life.)
• Listening skills would be tested regularly, and I think in some cases it would be easier to isolate and deal with pronunciation issues.
• Last but not least, you could teach in your underwear everyday! Just make sure you haven’t left the webcam on…
• Okay, one more: you could put you pets to work: