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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.