Yesterday I attended a class of Vikrama Dhiman about the new Learning Request System from WiZiQ, so basically about how to find students on this platform.

Although the audio was not very good I think I understood the idea .

And did you notice: they changed the new logo back to the old color scheme. Well done!

Here are the slides of Vikrama’s presentation:

Lets have a look step by step what this new feature can bring to you:

To accept a learning request, you have to do two things first:

Sign up for a premium account. The price for this is $49,95 per year so about $4 a month which is a fair price, I think. The premium account will also bring you additional features to the usability of the platform.

Then buy credits. Every Learning Request will have an amount of credits you will have to pay in order to accept the offer. Right now all offers are around 2 or 3 credits but it could be more, too. Credits will depend on the topic, the price and the region where the request comes from. In the smallest package 1 credit equals $1 but the more credits you will buy, the better the price will be, of course.

After you have opened your premium account and bought some credits you go to

http://www.wiziq.com/learning-requests/

There you will find a list of all Learning Requests posted by students. To give the students the possibility of choosing the best teachers, Learning Requests can be accepted by several teachers. Right now most of the request are available for 3 teachers.
This means: even if you pay your 2 credits ($2) for the contact information that will come with accepting the request it does not automatically mean that the student will choose you as his teacher. So be selective and choose only students where you can be quite sure that the student will choose you later on.

So what do you pay for and what are the benefits? Well, as my colleague Gaveston used to say: it helps you to avoid shaking empty boxes in the supermarket. All Learning Requests are checked by the WiZiQ team before they will go online. The credits are the payment for the service. And this way a teacher can be sure that there is a real student who is interested in a paid class or several of them. This makes the credits actually a good investment.

If you have a closer look at this screenshot of a Learning Request you can see the budget and the credits marked in yellow. 6000 INR are about $120 which means for an investment of $2 (plus the premium account, of course) you might get $120 back. Not bad.

And you have to see this Learning Request System only as a part of your possibilities to find students. It is sort of a short cut. The other methods are

- Public Classes (free or paid)
- Uploading Content
- Creating Tests
- Growing your Network

All these are long term investments but they can also help you to get a better conversion in your accepted Learning Requests later on.

Personally I like the fact that WiZiQ leaves the choice up to every teacher how much he wants to invest into his career. You can start for free and add service after service to your account just the way you want it. This way the platform is much more flexible and can be adjusted to your personal needs. I am really looking forward to what the future will bring.