VIPKID and Me

I embarked on adventure in January to upskill and gain new experience. I have a penchant for IT in the classroom; therefore, I wanted to explore online teaching. VIPKID is an online company that employs native speakers from USA and Canada to teach students in China. The students in China range in age form 5 - 15 years old. Most are enthusiastic learners and many of them are monitored by their parents during class, off-screen. Classes are videotaped and accessible to the student after class. The bulk of the student population is 7 - 9 years old. This is like the Uber of teaching.

Teachers open their schedule one week in advance and students are free to book any teacher or time based on availability, it is free scheduling in essence. Classes are 25 - 27 minutes long. Students have an extensive support system. Before they reach their online class, they have an English teacher in China, a book, homework and an app. Students follow a module Level 1 (letter recognition) to Level 6 (advanced scientific English). Each level has 10 Units, each unit consists of 12 lessons. There are assessments on the sixth and twelfth  lesson.

After each class students get feedback, the feedback is archived an accessible to other teachers. Parents have the option to rate and leave comments on teacher's performance. They use a 5 star system, but they substitute apples with stars. All of the comments and ratings are archived for parent's view. Your rating is based on parent's feedback. The combination of your rating and comments is how you attract new students in the marketplace. VIPKID's approach is based on synthetic phonics and the communicative approach. Thus far, it has been effective. I have found it enjoyable.

What was started as an experiment, is now a full fledge passion. There are many skills that must be adapted for effective teaching in the online classroom. I'm continuing to hone and refine my skills. Like anything, there are some advantages and disadvantages to the online classroom. However, there are many perks with working from home. Commutes, traffic, tolls, parking, bad weather and office politics are gladly absent from working online.

In VIPKID classroom, 2/3 of the screen normally displays a powerpoint slide controlled by the teacher. The student controls a blue on-screen pen and the teacher a red on-screen pen. the pen is controlled by touchpad or mouse. 1/6 of the screen is a streaming video of the student and the other is streaming video of the teacher. Here is a compilation of the streaming video of the teacher portion, the student portion is omitted for legal reasons.


click on link to watch compilation video