Guest blog: Make your digital transition and safely engage your students with Outschool

By Amy Yamner Jenkins, executive advisor at Education Elements.

Outschool is an online marketplace where educators teach highly engaging classes over Zoom; 130,000 students take classes on the platform. Outschool is offering a webinar for afterschool programs on safely engaging students with virtual programming April 23 at 2pm ET.

It is hard to be an organization that works with students these days; especially when you are used to in-person interactions. Across the country, students are not only missing their teachers and friends from the traditional school day; they are also missing the fun they had in their afterschool programs and the connections they made there. We get it!

Due to COVID-19, the Outschool team has been working on updating our platform so that it becomes a channel for live virtual lessons not only from individual and independent teachers, but also from afterschool programs and other youth, educational, and cultural organizations. We know that the recent (and ongoing) closures have an impact on the ability of afterschool programs to live out your missions and carry on with regular operations, but also know that programs are committed to staying connected with youth and providing engaging content. We’ve heard about some of the innovative ways afterschool programs have been doing this, and we want to help. 

Outschool is offering to provide afterschool programs with a way to engage with current students and beyond. With a safe platform and built-in, tested tools for educators to use in virtual classes, we hope we are able to give you a channel you can use to adapt programming and provide it online - so that children around the world are exposed to high quality content. Because the content is synchronous and live, it gives students and the teacher a chance to really connect, in a way that pre-recorded videos do not. We hope to help you engage with students, give staff a platform to continue their work from home, and offer the possibility of generating new revenue. 

What’s our interest in bringing in afterschool providers? Besides meeting our main goal to provide access to engaging content for students, we have seen a tremendous uptick in interest in our classes since schools closed, and we want to add more quality offerings. We have seens tens of thousands of families enrolling just in the last month!

Why consider us? Compared to offering virtual classes on your own, the biggest differences we offer are:

1. Access to our students from around the globe, which includes 800K families in our database now and continues to grow. 
2. The safety and security of our platform. Teachers all use our Zoom account and every class is recorded. All messaging happens on our platform so it is easy for us to audit it and fix any issues that come up. 
3. Tech support and training tools for online learning. 

How does an afterschool program join? An afterschool program could join as an organization, and offer multiple classes, perhaps 3-5 to start and building up to 10 or more. The program would have a branded page and support from our team. Or, if this feels like too much, Outschool could be a platform for a program staff to offer just a few classes, and a means to get your educators online.

How do students join? Families create an account online. No fee is charged for creating an account. Students can then enroll in your classes.

Do I have to pay to be on Outschool? Do students have to pay? Educators and programs do not pay to be on Outschool. Typically, we earn revenue through fees charged students, with 70 percent of fees going to the program or educator and 30 percent retained to Outschool. To offer free classes, see below. 

Can I offer classes just for my existing students free of charge? Recognizing the mission of many programs to serve existing students without charge, we are working on a workaround where the program pays instead of the students: Private classes for your existing students can be set up. For administrative tracking reasons, we need to charge a $1 fee that can then be refunded, We can work with you on how to structure your private and open offerings (open offerings would be for students anywhere in the world, who pay an enrollment fee). Outschool has also donated $1M in free classes to families who need them.

What does a program need to do to sign up? Fill out the application form here to get started

What kinds of classes can a program offer? We offer a variety of subjects and classes for kids aged 3-18. With the increase in demand for classes, we are not seeing any particular areas with huge spikes in demand (except for a bit of an increase for classes for kids under the age of 10) and we always have a need for content that engages and inspires and gets kids really doing things – whether in the realm of personal growth and social-emotional learning, arts, movement, music, video gaming, D&D, or academic subjects – what works best is content that is an area of passion or expertise for the instructor. 

Ready to learn more? Sign up here and someone will get back to you soon!