Learn Spanish Online right now with a
personal tutor in South America

South America Tour Update

We've now spent a little over 4 months traveling north through Peru, Ecuador and Columbia. Along the way we've had a chance to drop in to maybe 50 different Spanish schools and talk about our plans for FairTutor.

Overall, we've been pleasantly surprised at how enthusiastic everybody seems to be about the site. Typical responses range from "Sounds interesting. Let me know when you go live." To "I need this today. Where do I put the link on my website!" Granted, we do get the occasional concern that perhaps Peruvian internet connections (and computers) aren't quite up to the task yet, and there are a few schools who prefer to do things the old fashioned way, face to face. But in general, the response has been a lot more positive than we had expected.

We've received some great feedback and ideas that never would have occurred to us had we built this site without actually talking to a bunch of real schools. One important idea that came out of these meetings is the "Online Spanish School in a Box" concept that will allow established schools to add a mini version of the FairTutor website directly into their own site.

We're still on track to launch the site to paying students on June 1st, so if you're among the many schools and independent teachers who are helping us test the site, you might want to start polishing up your profile pages for the day when we'll open the doors to the public.

South America Tour

We're happy to announce that FairTutor is ready for private Beta testing. We're going to start letting individual Spanish teachers and schools on to the site to test it out with real students, so if you'd like to be one of the first to try out the site, be sure to get on the waiting list right away!

To help spread the word, we're going to do a tour of Peru, Ecuador and Columbia over the next few months in the hopes of meeting with existing Spanish schools. If you run a school and would like us to drop by, please send us an email at info@fairtutor.com and we'll try to include you in the trip.

We're hoping to get some good feedback from schools who may have tried online tutoring already, so that we'll know what sort of issues are likely to come up. We're intentionally doing this tour before the Online Classroom piece is fully completed, since we're pretty sure we're not smart enough to guess exactly what needs to go into it. If you're doing online Spanish lessons already, chances are you'll have some good ideas for us.

We'd certainly like to talk with you.

Fair Trade Tutoring

Today we're beginning development on FairTutor. It's a website that will connect Spanish teachers in South America with students in the United States and let them hold online Spanish classes. We call it Fair Trade tutoring, and we think it's going to turn into something big.

Online tutoring is a relatively new thing, but already there are several established businesses doing it. We hope to stand out from these other sites in three fundamental ways: focus, technology, and Fair Trade.

First off, you'll notice that all we do is Spanish tutoring. Spanish tutoring to Americans by teachers in Latin America, to be precise. No Math teaching, no Japanese lessons. Just Spanish.

We're doing that for a reason, because it means that we can focus on building the absolute best Spanish learning environment possible, without having to compromise anything so that we could, for example, solve Math problems. We can put a Spanish dictionary right into the classroom and nobody will complain. We can translate the entire website to Spanish so that our teachers have an easier time reading the instructions, and not have to worry about whether we should also translate it to French. There are a ton of advantages to focusing on just one thing, and we plan to benefit from all of them.

Next up is technology. We'll be building FairTutor on top of Twiddla, the leading educational meeting tool. Twiddla is an online meeting tool that's perfectly suited to holding classes online. Schools all over the world are using it today as a replacement for in-class whiteboards, and to hold online classes with remote students.

We'll be tailoring the Twiddla platform to meet the needs of the modern Spanish classroom, adding in new functionality to make teaching easier, stripping out anything that we don't need. Because we're focused, we can improve the technology beyond what it was originally intended to do.

Finally, and perhaps most important, is Fair Trade. FairTutor will be a marketplace where individual teachers can establish their own presence and compete on their own merits. Teachers can set their own hourly rate in this market, but we won't allow them to set a price that's less than a fair living wage in their country of origin.

By exposing teachers directly to students in countries with a higher standard of living, FairTutor and its students will help to raise the potential income level for hundreds, perhaps thousands of language teachers and their families.

That's a pretty nice thing to be building. We'll keep you posted as we go along.