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Yesterday, I received one of the new and regularly coming News Bulletins from the Myngle education team. Normally you can get the news by reading the email for gist but this one caught my attention as it presents some substantial additions to the platform.

In fact the coming changes could give Myngle a lead over its competitors.

Those changes will basically turn Myngle from a teacher-student (controlled & regulated) marketplace to a more elaborated platform like WiZiQ, Sclipo or Udemy nowadays are already. And that is pretty huge.

1- You will be able to add asynchronous learning resources, which can be used by the students before or after their classes:

- You will be able to add podcasts, flashcards, youtube videos, games, newspapers to your courses
- You will be able to upload pdf, doc, ppt to your courses.
- You will be able to record your Podcasts in the library so you can add them to your courses.
- You will be able to link and add any content already present in the library to your course or add content from Myngle shop (shop.myngle.com).
2- You can offer these resources for free or paid.
3- These resources can be set as private ( for yout students who are studying this course) or publish so any student can use them or buy them if you set a price.
4- In the payment page, the student will have the option to buy your lesson(s) and/or your “extra study resource”.
5- Last but not least, now course and lesson description will support more formatting styles such as paragraphs, bullet points, bold, underline.

I think you can all see the benefits quite clearly. Myngle currently have the advantage over some competitors that their platform has regular lessons going on and that it has managed to build a loyal base of teachers who are willing to work “under the conditions” presented. The secret sauce of Myngle is the fact that they actually get teachers into earning money. One can argue about the pricing issues (as I did in length) and the fact that Myngle chose a controlled environment (also discussed in depth) but to some teachers this all seems to be alright if not even favorable.

So, the interesting part will be if those teachers are the ones who will invest extra time to brush up their courses with extra material or if it is sufficient for them to earn something aside the way they do now. The system that WiZiQ, Sclipo and Udemy chose is clearly targeted to edupreneurs who want to get the max revenue out of their students / clients which also means that they want to minimize their own costs and have a maximum of control.

Hence, I could even imagine that we see some teachers who are not really successful working on those platforms changing camps and sign up on Myngle. The benefits like the regular boost which still seems to attract students and the fact that Myngle actually has paying students on the platform are arguments you cannot ignore and may help to accept working in a walled garden.

One can argue that on the one hand Myngle targets teachers who prefer to work under more controlled but therefore also secure conditions but generally those teachers teach to earn some extra money and not full time in order to make a living on it at least when they come from Europe or the US. Of course teachers who live in developing countries like the Philipines, North Africa, India, South America etc can actually make a decent living on the rates and we all know that the ESL market is heavily under pressure from the Philipines as teachers from there are generally seen as native speakers in countries like South Korea and of course an English teacher from the US/UK cannot compete with the rates those teachers take. But that is a whole different story.

In the end we have to see how teachers embrace the new tools and then how students react on extra content. Many teachers might now offer this extra content for free as it can be used as a loop hole to differentiate themselves from other teachers at the low end of the pricing list now that Myngle plugged the leak by setting the minimum fee to 9 Euro per 30 minutes. Also Myngle needs to verify the material uploaded in order to avoid copyright infringements etc. but that is something every platform has to struggle with as soon as it allows content to be hosted.

I guess, as always, time will tell. But the move is a right one taking into account the course structure of most Myngle teachers is targeting beginner to intermediate students and therefore clearly not conversational focused. Now it is up to the Myngle teachers to make use of the tools.