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Since I had that business idea a couple weeks ago, my company has partnered with a curriculum development company, got an IT consultant in to set up infrastructure and tech support, we got an education consultant in, we've taken in 300 teacher resumes, AND our first bookings. 1
Oh! And we got a bunch of people to chip in small amounts of money to cover the advertising budget, which is the part that's killing me tbth. So what are we doing? Online high school lessons - tutoring: grades 6-11. Math, Science, History/Social Studies. 2
Classes are based on the Ontario curriculum and will cover the last 3 months of studies. We have a teenager and the materials sent over by the school district aren't good - one was a link to the RBC mortgage calculator. There's no curriculum, no concrete lesson plan. 3
Also, with a teenager in the house, it's a finite space and you don't want to make isolation worse by arguing with a teen and fighting over homeschooling and homework. Moving this all off to a third party that knows what they're doing was the best option for us. 4
So we have a course schedule that includes 2 1-hour lessons per week of Math, the same of Science, and History, then a 1 hour individual tutoring session to catch up, and a 1-hour online peer group study session. It results in a 3-hour per day block of study, 5 days per week. 5
In terms of teacher pay, we looked at average teacher pay in Ontario and nearly doubled it. Doing that though means we need a minimum of 5 students per grade to make the programs break even. The maximum group size is 15. 6
We've priced it at $60 per week - which we hope is in the budget of most people. We'll be coming out with 'light' versions in a couple weeks, as well as a package program so that smaller communities can run their own groups based on our model. 7
So that's how I've spent isolation. That + editing articles, writing a couple articles, working on book edits, managing overseas IT team for new company, managing staff at old company - which is somehow all still less work than normal. Our site is here: http://www.experienceeducation.ca 8
