Free Classes on eduFire!!!

Hey everybody, I’ve been waiting for a long time to announce this!!!

Starting next week we’re partnering with some of the top teachers here on eduFire to launch our first-ever Courses. Courses on eduFire will consist of one teacher and multiple students. Each Course will be different, some will be conversational while others will be more lecture-based with Q & A periods and discussions.

Here’s the best part: During the trial run of eduFire Courses we’re making classes absolutely free to eduFire members! In part this is for us to get feedback of course. But it’s also our way of saying thank you to you for bringing your incredible energy and enthusiasm to eduFire. There’s no way we would have grown so fast or have such an amazing community without all of you.

So what are you waiting for? Starting signing up for classes already!!! :) :) :)

Here are a few of our first offerings. We’ll be posting more soon!

Beginner Conversational Spanish – Enrique (who’s awesome!) is teaching a beginning Spanish class at 6 PM PDT next Tuesday and Thursday. His class is limited to six students so definitely hop on this one quick! :)

French Franchement – The inimitable Patrick is teaching a class designed to help you survive if you were “surrounded by a flock of French wolves.” What does that mean? You’ll have to take his class to find out!! Thursday at Midnight PDT which should be pretty convenient for night owls and people not in North America. :)

Deutsch for Many!- – John Williams heard the name before…he’s even been featured on Mashable. Now’s he’s teaching you to sprechen sie Deutsch! Mondays at 6 PM PDT. 14 seats left and I’m already registered!

GMAT Basics – In the grand tradition of other famous teachers such as Michael Jordan and Jay-Z yours truly- will be coming out of retirement and dusting off his GMAT books and to help you to prepare for the business school entrance exam. This class is one-time only, October 6th @ 5 PM PDT. (Hey, who knows, if it goes well I might make this a regular thing!).

Really, really excited about this. Tell all your friends!! We’re gonna have a lot of fun and learn at the same time!!!

PS If you have questions about these classes please post a reply here or send me a message.

PPS If you’re interested in teaching one-to-many classes here on eduFire and want more details feel free to drop me a line. We’d love to add some more outstanding teachers!

When I said we’d be adding more classes soon I wasn’t lying. :) In the last hour we’ve added two new, cool classes:

An Introduction to the Japanese Language – Koichi’s in the house with an introduction to the Japanese language. This Wednesday at 5 PM PDT. Don’t miss this one. Koichi’s great!!

Intermediate Spanish Conversation – Sebastian is easily one of the most accomplished tutors on eduFire. If you know a little Spanish this class will be perfect for you! 4 PM PDT on Tuesdays and only 10 seats available so sign up pronto!

More to come!!

I’m sad that I have time conflicts with most of these courses :(

How exciting! I’m hoping to take one of John’s German classes if I can work out some schedule issues.

Thanks Jon!

As we add more courses/teachers this should help to make the scheduling easier. It’d be great too if people can post here and let us know when good times are so teachers can keep that in mind when setting their schedules.

Also, one more note, and this is important, tutors do not have to create student accounts to sign up for these classes. We haven’t yet created the ability for a person to be both a tutor and a student from the same account for one-to-one but for the purposes of these classes you’ll be able to register just fine without creating a new account if you’re a tutor.

This is so cool! I enjoyed signing up with my tutor account! The future has arrived!

Well for me 8:00 – 5:00 Pacific works best – after that, there are these other people here who expect me to pay attention to them! (To quote my teenage daughter – whatever!)

Okay.. cool on not having to set up another acct. to be a student in a course session… =) This is a great idea & I will sign up… =)

This is definitely the wave of the Future :)

the eduFuture!

tee hee… that’s great, Koichi! =)

and even more has been added too! Italian with Marco Valesi! He is really cool and worth checking out! :)

Wow, this really is good news! :) THANK YOU, JON!!!

A couple of small questions though:

1. What’s the difference between the ‘Register for this Course’ and ‘Sign up now’ buttons? Does ‘registering’ mean we want to take the whole course, and ‘signing up’ mean we just want to take part in the first session? Or maybe the other way round? Once we registered, can we drop out if something comes up and the course doesn’t fit our schedule anymore?

2. This may sound mean, but here we go: How much will the trial last? :)) I see courses that last for many weeks, even months, so the whole set of sessions can’t possibly be free…

I’d definitely sign up for at least one of these courses! And even if I do have a student account (hehehe :P), signing up with my tutor account will be great! :)

I made a mistake with the Time ! 9 AM for me is not good because it is midnight or even worst for most US residents. How can I change. I don’t see any option for changing the parameters…

This is really exciting stuff!! The multi- users sessions and the tutor/student accounts…good stuff!

I’m going to try to do this as well as Jon does it, but there’s no way I can capture the magic of his forum posting:

Two more courses added!

ITALIANO – Marco Valesi Come check out Marco’s Italian class. With ten years of teaching experience under his belt, plus a fun outlook on life, he’s a sure bet if you want to learn some Italian and have a great time doing it! Be careful, or you’ll be booking a flight to Rome in no time!

Math SAT Jumpstart – Chris Thron Ick, math, nobody likes math. But wait, why am I enjoying it when Chris talks about it? Is it his passion for the subject? Is it his philosophy on how math can be learned by anyone, even a poor sap like myself? You’ll have to jump on in to find out!

Check these courses out (and all the other ones, further up)!

Patrick! Don’t worry, we’ll sort out your time issue. I’ll get to it! :)

Great presentation, Koichi! :)

What about my two questions? ;;)

@Sandra

1. What’s the difference between the ‘Register for this Course’ and ‘Sign up now’ buttons? Does ‘registering’ mean we want to take the whole course, and ‘signing up’ mean we just want to take part in the first session? Or maybe the other way round? Once we registered, can we drop out if something comes up and the course doesn’t fit our schedule anymore?

No difference. We just need to do a better job with our messaging. :)

2. This may sound mean, but here we go: How much will the trial last? :)) I see courses that last for many weeks, even months, so the whole set of sessions can’t possibly be free…

Currently if a class is on the schedule it’s free for as long as it lasts. Of course, the teacher reserves the right to cancel the class at any point in time (as do we) but yeah, if it’s a long class you just may luck out. :)

Thanks for the reply and the explanations, Jon! :) That’s one of the things I like most about eduFire – everybody’s so helpful and you can easily get help from the boss himself!!! :) Thank you!

And free classes is another thing I love about the site, hee hee… :)

Hmm… good questions, good answers.

I think this will not only draw in tutors but more students. Excellent idea, Jon!! This site is really excellent & I am happy to be a part of this growing community… thanks! =)

This is great! I’m signed up for Spanish and Japanese.

Jon, thanks so much for offering these classes! I’ve been needing to take classes to get comfortable with online tutoring. I’m sure I’ll be inspired to get to the next level!

Do you think everybody easily interprets eduFire class days and times? I’m wondering whether there ought to be a footnote:
“times stated are PDT = UTC/GMT -8 hours.”

Hi DJ,

Each eduFire user sees the course time in their local time zone. In your case, you are being shown the time in PDT, because you’ve chosen “Pacific Time, US & Canada” as your time zone.

It could be made clearer, though. We’ll see about adding a Time Zone identifier to the “Scheduled Time” on the course page to see if that helps.

Regards,
Jared

Hmm.. good to know, Jared! Thanks for the clarification. =)