The business of online tutoring

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dizzz

New member
Hi, bumped into FP a few times before and read around but never registered, this is first post...

Thing is I'm considering entering a project in the field of online tutoring for music producers - think musicacademy.com, macprovideo.com, groove3, music-courses.com. There are many others but these ones have convenient price points and are high quality. I'm not aiming to become a direct competitor, rather I'm thinking of targeting complete beginners, and have more structure in the study plan (not just offer random courses), and a different pricing structure.

I'm trying to understand how this industry works - do these producers/tutors who appear on the videos work for a fixed fee or is there some revenue sharing involved? Are the produced materials (videos etc) exclusive or producer retains rights? What would be an expected price to produce an hour of such course? (of course it depends on the tutor, but I'm looking for some initial average data).

Would love to get any insights you have about this industry, thanks in advance!
Ps if you were/are involved in such projects, I'd love to have a chat, feel free to pm me
 
hmm what?
don't want to sound rude but seems you just hijacked my thread to promote your site and didn't even read my post. but then again i'm new here so who am i to complain, right? :)
 
Reported

Some passing thoughts as I contemplate this issue....

On-line tutoring can be a real headache: if you are doing it properly with assignments and everything, you need to have a cash flow to pay someone to mark/assess them.

Essentially your tools for production are a video editing workstation like vegas or final cut or premiere, something to make graphics with, something to make your background audio, record your voice-overs and any miscellaneous actions like generating scripts.

Talent will always cost and very few of that talent pool can afford to take a percentage of the profits: they need money to live today, whereas it may take years to turn a profit and see a viable income stream

Going back to when I worked on an ad-hoc basis in higher education (1990's) you can expect to pay at least triple what the actual hour is worth: this because you are paying for pre-production/preparation, presentation and post-production follow-up (retakes, voice-overs, etc). In todays terms that would be at least $180 for the talent simply to show up and present a lesson to multiple groups of students. this would not include licenses for individual works used in the presentation nor any compensation for long term repeat presentations of the same material to different students.

In addition, if you are buying the package outright, you need to have clearances, etc as well as pay for the preparation and packaging of the lesson. Any original work (music, etc) would need to be licensed exclusively or on the basis of usage within the current product (i.e. one time fee for all future use).
 
thanks for the reply. sure i know we need to accrue some expenses at least to start with, we have the budget.

about course production you mentioned someone physically showing up, then a complex production process. i'm not familiar with industry standards, but what i had in mind is rather quite simple - screenscasts. If i'm totally off track here, and simple screencast is not the way to go, please tell me. Honestly i didnt check in depth what the competition (groove3 etc) has to offer.
 
a screen cast will cut it, but you still need to prepare the material, a script, do voice overs - it is not always easy to get everything as you do something - it may take multiple takes or it may just be that you do a voice over describing the process after actually capturing the process from the screen feed.

In either case, it will take more time than the hour of video that you would on-sell or stream to customers/students.

The more complex the information to be presented the more time it will take to get it right.....
 
yeah makes sense.
actually some industry estimates i heard were that 10 min of video are equal 3 hours of work. to me it seems a bit far fetched, but maybe 1-2 hours of work for 10 min video is more sensible.
 
I'd back that from hands on experience - I took television production when i was at university and for our final project we created a for tv production of a play that lasted a little over 90 minutes.

We spent somewhere in the order of 6 weeks pre-production (rehearsals for actors, etc) 1 week filming and a further 6 weeks post-production. even then we did not get it finished as the play was too complex to recast for television (at least in terms of our production skills) and some folks doing the course did not pull their weight, leaving huge gaps in the footage and music scoring.
 
Good for you. If you consider yourself good enough then only enter into online tutoring field because there are lot of other tutors like you who rate themselves as the best.
 
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