We chatted about pay and whether prep time was included in our hourly rates at schools we had worked at before. Then we touched briefly on how pay can vary wildly in different countries (for example, in Geneva the starting rate is 40€+ per hour!) – though obviously cost of living is very different too. This made us wonder about charging different rates for people depending on where they’re based. A couple of people who are freelance said that they have different rates depending on the platform the student comes via – for example, LinkedIn might be a platform to market on with a higher rate as you’re more likely to interact with business people.
We chatted a lot about social media and about the need to post different content on different platforms. This led on to questions around batching content and whether it’s better to have a strict schedule or more flexibility. There was a question of whether the algorithm gods like consistency 🙂 Instagram was highlighted as a place ‘where all the happy yoga people are’ with a feeling that interactions on there tend to be largely positive simply because you can only love content, whilst on Facebook and LinkedIn there’s a wider variety of responses available.
There were also questions around using the analytics tool with a suggestion that it can be useful to know where your followers are based in terms of creating content to appeal to a particular market. As well, someone mentioned that it’s important to remember that just because someone doesn’t visually engage with your content, it doesn’t mean they don’t have you in their mind. There was a feeling that social media engagement is for a reward in the long-term more than one post immediately generating revenue. One other thing which was mentioned was about the importance of engaging with other people’s content for yours to be more visible and someone had heard the tip of liking ten posts before you post your own.
We touched very briefly on teacher organisations where we’re based and BELTA and ELTA-Rhine got a quick mention as places which promote PD and often have things going on.
And finally we chatted about transcription tools – no new ones were mentioned although we had a chat around how forgiving they can be – it feels like sometimes they aren’t so great for allowing learners to see their pron mistakes as the tech is developing and correcting errors which in recognises in chunks; at the same time it was felt that often if you don’t have a standard accent or if you haven’t scripted the content, the AI is less precise. We chatted a bit around putting closed captions on video content for social media – for example with YouTube there’s an option to automatically create subtitles which you can then edit, and Instagram offers a captioning tool but it might only be available through certain versions. This led us on finally to discuss very briefly whether subtitles are a crutch for learners and whether using them means you practise reading more than listening.