51Talk

Recently 51talk has gotten a new endorser, former Miss Universe Pia Wurtzbach, to promote the online teaching site in the Philippines.
Needless to say, this move has gotten a lot of interested applicants. Do not be fooled! This is an unfair company.

Aside from their super unfair teaching rate and false advertising, they will never hear out teacher appeals on our negative feedbacks and they will cite bull$#*! reasons as to why they should sanction you for the feedback you got when you rebutted the comment correctly.

Most of the time, the parents give out negative feedback if their children get low grades even though it is completely justified. The company will not hear you out again when you appeal to this.

They also deduct fees against you when you encounter difficulties attending a lesson arising from natural disasters or uncontrollable circumstances, like power outages and internet interruptions. They also will force you to open a lot of slots per cut off even if you stated you are a PART TIME teacher.

No alerts for booked classes. Also, students are allowed to book you for lessons 2mins in the lesson slot time. To top it off, their crappy website wouldn't allow you to close a slot 1min before the actual start time to avoid this instance. (Pro tip: Use their crappy phone app to cancel)

I am only sticking it out with them because of my regular students, but as for their management and treatment of employees? You're better off finding other online ESL tutorial services with better policies to protect your $#*! and interests.

PS. Currently on the process of getting onboarded to a different company now. Best of luck if you decide to apply or stick with 51talk. Adios!

If you want to work for someone with a management style straight out of the 1950's this is the place. No questions are every answered. All decisions are made in China. Procedures are not tested. We do this as a standard practice no need to test for a new use. Examples of how software should work are not provided. The teacher is told the set up the first time. But for only one case among several. If something doesn't work it must be your fault and you should spend your time working it out with tech support. (This is only a problem as they never tested to see if the procedure would work.) Company uses three different interfaces to students with varying levels of quality. They are doing you a favor to let you work for them. Business policy makes no sense. They raised the rates 33% for native language teachers which resulted in a 70 to 100% loss of bookings for teachers.

Here is a link to their policy. This has only been consolidated and posted as of 6/15/17.
http://mypage.51talk.com/candidate/#/FAQ

I have worked for 51 Talk for almost a year now and there have been some good and many very bad experiences.

To start with, the lesson plans are provided. They are obviously written in the Philippines and there are some small grammatical and fluency problems. That is not that big of a deal and the students actually seem to like having the teacher correct the flaws in the lesson.

Once you have been at the company for a while, getting student 'bookings' are not an issue. To begin with, though, you will struggle to find regular students and have to perform many 'free trial' lessons for potential students. These are mind-numbing as you will mostly be teaching colors or numbers to children with absolutely no English background and possibly no experience with online learning.

As stated in the policy page, students can both leave a review of you as a teacher and leave messages in a bulletin board (which I have never seen). This can be frustrating as bookings are very much determined by other student's review of you. For a beginner teacher, this can mean that one bad review will cause you to lack bookings for several days. There is no way of contesting a rating. So, as mentioned by others, if the student complains about their internet connection, it is poor reflection on you. This is indescribably frustrating.

I personally have never experienced the payroll issues that others have and have always received a wire transfer to a US bank within the posted time frame. (Once a month on the 12th)

The problems are if you experience any issue like connectivity or the need to cancel a lesson. If you read over the policies, they sound reasonable in theory. A small fee if you cancel a lesson over a day in advance and increasing the closer you get to the time of the lesson. The problem is that the attendance number to call in an emergency NEVER connects to a real person. I have tried it even when I wasn't missing a lesson just to test it. And if you try their support page to chat with someone, you will wait for at least an hour before you are connected to someone. The teacher support should be considered non-existent.

All this being said, I still work for them part time as does my wife, and I enjoy the regular students that take my lessons. I do feel that I have a good impact in their learning and actually have fun teaching them. I can attest to the honesty of the other reviews on this page and feel their frustration. If you are a self-sufficient worker and can intuit how to work their system, you can succeed with this company. If you can not, they will most likely cause a stress ulcer.