@Martin. Students’ opinions are certainly welcome, and the fact that you took the time and nerve to post your answer suggests that you are enthusiastic.

As I see it, edufire is not a platform, not like Blackboard or Moodle.
Edufire is a growing community of people-like-us who want to change education and make it available to all the people, close or far, rich or poor.

A simple, but revolutionary idea.

I’ve been told that I am a romantic and a dreamer, and they are probably right ….
Even though I am still a rookie here, I feel the need to talk about edufire as “us”. Of course, there are the founding fathers, the Ruby on Rails gurus, the marketing and PR wizards, but the community is us, and it is our job to make sure that we perform our mission (making education available to all).

@Martin I agree in part with you…. however it is not the sole responsibility of Edufire to provide the teachers with students. It is a very useful platform with a GREAT team. It is small and all the big kids were small at one time. The difference between Huge and small is that the edufire team will if at all possible assist you personally with getting your class up and running, you can actually talk to the CEO of the company.
This is a fledgling company that I personally would like to see succeed because if it does then I will in part succeed also… Keeping that in mind it is the responsibility for each of the tutors to do everything that they can to bring people to the site both students and other tutors. There are millions of people with computers who are interested in learning something new… This is the beginning of the information age and this is a live learning opportunity. There really are not that many out there and certianly not many that are free.
If Interested please watch my profile page and my post here in the forum… I am working on some information which will be a free class that might help students and teachers market the realworld to feed the virtual world.
Ultimately though it is the responsibility of each person who uses the site to market the site.
The tiny 15% that the edufire company makes from their percentage of class fees probably barely pays for the staff which is very small and the hosting and software tools that are available to us free. We are not being bombarded with ads for everything you can think of so that tells me that someone is paying for a professional version of whatever software we are so blithely using. None of this is free so our give back so far has been 15% of the revenue from classes taught…. I am saying that it needs to extend to printing our own brochures business cards and advertising of our own classes to draw students and teachers, Often when the high powered teachers come to the site they bring 100’s of students with them, that’s how I found the site…. a heavy hitter whom I knew was teaching a class on edufire and told his facebook thread…… It is our job to bring what few students we can from our sphere of influence with us. If each of us brought 1 student a week it would be amazing what this would look like in a few months.
I am recieving emails from clients and customers whom I meet just in passing asking me what was that website you said you were giving a class on….Some of them have become members, some have sent others to take classes in things I have no knowledge of like language or computer science but it all increases the visibility of the site which ultimately increases the revenue for the teachers, the quality of the material offered and the revenue of the company which then makes more for the company to use to do extra marketing and service.
All in all it’s a spiral….

The information on the alexa site Martin posted is fascinating!
Look, this one tells you about the growth of eduFire over different time periods and how eduFire ranks in different countries and also where students are ‘hitting’ eduFire from:
edufire on alexa
Look at the percentage from India! Who would have guessed?
This is just the sort of thing I have been wondering about – not much of a UK market at the moment then!
I am still tinkering with the other site – have you got any interesting searches there to share Martin?

Wow…. reading this thread really makes me feel part of a revolutionary mission! Really amazing to be involved in this community. I feel that there are a vast number of people who are skeptical of online learning or unaware of edufire….

@ Alaia: I totally agree with your comment. I think if everyone contributed to spreading the word locally, not just through online advertising, would definitely help! Personally, I’m looking into advertising at universities. I often see signs up for people teaching private French classes for example…. Surely, the convenience and relaxed teaching environment on eduFire would be attractive to university students. Even advertising in local papers might attract people. These are my next strategies…. I’m convinced that this will work! They are out there somewhere just waiting to be “edufired”!

RPS = Revenue Per Student, or the amount a teacher gets paid per student under the Superpass program. Unfortunately, its gone down 2 months in a row. And, that’s disturbing. Yes, its gone down cents, but, its the trend that worries me.

@mark – edufired teehee! Good call…. also just people that you speak with casually… It’s amazing how many people either know something that is of value to learn or want to learn something new.
Everyone – Is there anyone out there in the community who knows how to create a pdf that can have content added to it. or even a jpg that can be tweaked. Inquiring minds want to know….

I really like what Mark O’Hagan mentioned about advertising Edufire on college campuses. It is funny, I and several of the Spanish Knight’s group were just discussing plans for this the other day. This would be particularly effective if you have personal contacts on that campus and could actually speak to people who you know and who trust you. I am interested in more ideas about how to get the word out. Frankly, I think we are wasting effort in arguing about whether it is Edufire’s or our responsibility to market our classes. It only matters that it is within our power to tell as many people as possible and if we do then we will help everyone. The Edufire admins can not do it all regardless of what resources some may think they have. We tutors are much more powerful marketing agents since we are many people with many connections and we are directly involved and will directly reap the benefits of increased traffic.

Stanley
Caballero andante

Stanley!!! Yes!! as soon as I can figure how to post a picture here … I will share the card that I created and giving to people I encounter. I am very open to ideas about a brochure and a postcard… I know most of you are teaching language and know I am coming into contact with many people each day who would be interested. If you can write a soundbite type of thing in your language and let me have it I will create a brochure that we can all print out and share or have printed on vista or where ever. We could each add in our own profile address on whatever brochure.
It is a collaborative effort that will help us all. The main languages that I am encountering are, Spanish German, Japanese and Hindi although most of the Hindi speakers seem to also speak english… still it couldn’t hurt.
I am sort of at the crossroads of the pacific and encounter a large # of languages on any given day…
Would love to spread the word.
A

@Enrique: I see two possible reasons:

1) Students realize that they don’t have the time to take full advantage of the Superpass and therefore cancel it (and they might pay for individual lessons as I do). Thus: there are fewer students with a small number of classes per month under the Superpass program.

2) Other students, who have more time available, realize that the Superpass is a great deal for them and take lots of classes to take full advantage of the Superpass (as my friend Joyce does). Thus: there are more students with a high number of classes per month under the Superpass program.

Both trends have the effect that the average number of classes per student per month increases! As the amount of money per student per month stays constant (the price of the Superpass per month), there is less money per class, i.e. the RPS goes down. Hmm, OK, that was quite a bit of math but it’s not too difficult if you think about it for a while! :)

Thanks, Martin, those certainly are entirely plausible reasons.

Mi amigo Martin. Superpass is still new, and therefore it still has its flaws and loopholes…..I understand that.

I hate to bring this up again. I know its not a popular topic. And its actually brought some division among members.

There have been irregularities, and abuses committed. They were being reported…..personally I reported a few. Unfortunately, for some reason I saw no action taken. I got discouraged, and stopped reporting them. Appropiate action should have been taken at the appropiate time.

The next thing I know was This something we knew was coming. It should have been stopped before it got out of control.

The problem lies HERE, and its HERE that it must be solved. I know that edufire is working on it. I don’t know what they’re doing. They keep very hush hush about it. And rightfully so. I agree on this point.

Hey guys. Great thread. Absorbing all of your comments and of course loving all of the enthusiasm.

Specifically on the RPS front, the main reason why it dropped was because we’ve had some circumstances of people abusing the SuperPass system. We’re working out those kinks and instituting some new policies. However, it seems like if there’s a loophole in SuperPass people will find it! (The thread Enrique linked to in the previous post describes some of the things we’ve seen to date.)

We’re hoping to lift it again in the future but it’s important to note that it will fluctuate every month and that means it may move up or down. At the end of the day we need to be able to run enough of a margin on SuperPass to pay for server costs, customer service, etc. So while we’d love to pay you an RPS of $50(!!), obviously we can’t do that (we’d be out of business very quickly! :)). It’ll be an ongoing balancing act to meet both the goal of paying teachers an amount that they feel is fair and the goal of creating a sustainable company.

Oye Martin,
It may be the fault of the EduGourmets (like you), the EduGluttons (like me), or maybe, as Enrique suggests, it’s the EduCrooks. Me, I think there just aren’t enough diners coming to the restaurant because, for some reason, they haven’t heard how great the food is!

wondering why eduFire admin is not in the discussion, this topic seems to become pretty hot….

Jon. Thanks for clearing the RPS drop. At least I know I was right in my assumption, and its not a subscription issue.

@Leo Marco (admin) posted on Page 1 and Jon (our great eduFire leader!) just posted 2 above you :)

Thanks Debbie, just saw Jon’s post, he typed faster than me :)

Appreciate all the discussions, at least I learned what I can do to help bring student to start my teaching, thanks!

Thanks to Jon for weighing in on the business side. I appreciate that staff are helping to combat SuperPass abuse.

I’ll redouble my efforts to make SuperPass work for myself as I work to craft high level courses worthy of higher dollar totals with up-front payment for advanced subjects.

@Leo Yes! That happens to me :)

I’m with Joyce…. More edudiners at the “edurestaurant” and we win by numbers alone.
Take a look at the about section of the site… This company is tiny….. to be doing what they are accomplishing is HUGE.
We all learn by doing whether it’s speaking a language, teaching a class coaching one on one or even walking…. And that goes for creating a brand new education model as well.Yes there were abuses to the system, yes they are working to prevent them, yes even they require time to eat sleep go potty and have a life outside of serving us!
Super pass may not be the way to create a language class… so be it… It works for other subjects and so the beauty of this platform and this opportunity is that it is a place of choice. If you don’t agree with Superpass and you feel it does not work for you – Make your classes what will work for you and offer them to the students. Bring your strength to the table. If we all do everything we can to bring more “diners” to the restaurant the little bit that the educrooks sneak will not be so noticeable.
The way I see it… we can spend our time lamenting that super pass payout was down by 8 cents this month when we know that there was a problem and that it is in the repair stages or we can bring more people to the platform who we convert to Superpass thus increasing the payout.
I guess it boils down to where do we want to put our energy… I am choosing to let more people know about the platform… I don’t really care whether they get a superpass or take individual classes from joe blow… as long as they show up, have a good experience and tell someone else how great edufire is. It is a numbers game and If we spend the time and effort to get other people in front of their computers and coming to this site we HAVE TO WIN!…

One day the “edurestaurant” will have a line for people to queue up to get in.:D
@ Alaia, I love to read your posts. They are all very inspiring and encouraging.
As for the question on “less students?” I agreed with Marco’s earlier post that tutors need to promote themselves or rather produce high quality lessons. Whenever I have a quieter day, I will normally head back to my working pc and work on new materials or improve on the existing ones. And strangely, I will have new students coming in while I am doing that.:D 2 days ago I received a message from a student that says she is" impatiently waiting" for my November class. Well, I can only tell you that this message is worth more than 3.80.:)

You all are so cool! Love the enthusiasm and the new vocabulary! We’re creating not a platform, not a community, but an educulture here!

Wow, so much to take in. This is so inspiring to see everyone so,….. lack of better words ~ excited on the subject. I have already enjoyed many classes and about to present my first class on Saturday. My experiences so far have only been positive (even the little things that needed corrections were learning experiences, in my eyes that makes it a positive). All of you are wonderful!

Very interesting discussion and I am surprised that I have not commented on this sooner. The RPS does fluctuate every now and then, as does any business. But, I believe that a couple cents will not kill the Superpass program. Hopefully, the people that are taking a bit of advantage of EduFire are caught and quit their crimes. We do not need that here!

As for the less students, I have to admit that there isn’t as much activity as usual going on around here, but I am sure that people have their reasons. Either way, I am happy about what everyone is doing on here and keep going with making this community even better! :)

Thought I’d post a link here of a separate thread since it pertains to what we are discussing here, too :)