I finally realised a couple of years ago that there was so little chance of me following through on any of my ideas long enough to make money on them that I might as well just give them away, hence the scrappy but hopefully useful worksheets on here and telling a publisher who had finally accepted my book proposal “Can’t you just give the idea to Jon Marks to write?” Hence also blog posts on Big Teacher, the TEFL legal fund and whathaveyou. The Speed Mentoring post has prompted me to write a few more that I’ve had in my mind for a while.
The idea behind TEFLstats is that, in contrast to all other TEFL sites, it would only include numbers. These numbers would be submitted by the readers and the site owner, and could be of any kind at all, e.g.
- Numbers of teachers in particular countries, schools or chains
- Numbers of schools in particular cities, countries or chains
- Ditto for students learning English
- Hours of English studied in particular countries and school systems
- Ages students typically start and finish English
- Cost of courses
- Pay for teachers, e.g. in a particular school, from a survey of a jobs page
- Pay increments, e.g. for having a diploma
- Classroom hours
- Results of surveys, e.g. reasons people are taking the CELTA, what percentage of schools advertising or phoned said they accepted online certs when recruiting teachers
- Pass rates for particular TEFL cert, EFL exam etc.
- Data from TEFL research
- Published or personal estimates of any of these for the whole word
- Rankings of countries (e.g. by TOEIC score- as meaningless as that is, students taking international exams, countries international students are from, by entrance test level in a school in London)
- Graphs, e.g. of number of job listings on the 5 most popular sites
There would be places to put the name of the person submitting the information, source of the information, details of who exactly it refers to (e.g school and branch name) etc, but those can be left blank by people who want to retain some kind of anonymity, or could be given but made only available to the site owner (i.e. three possible privacy settings). Apart from that, all the information would be available to everyone who visited the site, both as raw data and as pages of analysis by the site owner or readers.
Anyone fancy setting that up, then? I’d be happy to submit numbers as I come across them, but otherwise will be flitting onto my next passing fancy and so you’ll get no other help from me…
