The Best Side Hustles for Teachers: Udemy & Outschool

Professional educators like teachers, professors and even tutors possess a specific set of skills that is perfectly suited for numerous side hustles. You can basically do the same thing you’ve always done by teaching classes to students, but by doing it online you can drastically reduce your workload and increase your income.

Some of the best side hustles for teachers involve making video classes for students. Parents can buy these tutoring courses for their kids, and you get paid each time. This means that you can actually make money while you sleep or even while you’re at school teaching other children.

Thank You Teachers

Before I start talking about some specific side hustles that teachers can easily do, I first want to simply say thank you to all teachers. My mom has been a teacher for most of her adult life. She really put her heart and soul into teaching for many years, winning Teacher of the Year at least two different times. Now that the end of her career is approaching, there’s not much left to show for it. To me, it seems like teachers should be valued a lot more than they are now, and they should definitely get paid more money.

Teaching isn’t an easy job. You have to spend a ton of money to graduate college just to end up with a job that barely pays living expenses. The hours can be long, and work can even follow you home with papers to grade. No matter how hard you try, there will always be students that just don’t want to learn, but this doesn’t make it less frustrating for the teacher.

Ultimately, I think all teachers deserve better. Their jobs should either be made easier, or they should be paid a lot better. That’s part of my motivation for writing this guide. I want to teach other teachers that you can take your current set of skills and use it to generate a full-time income working at home on your computer. Best of all, you’ll never have to grade another test or piece of homework again!

Pandemic Training – Online School

Before COVID happened, the job of a teacher was pretty standard and didn’t change very much over time. During the pandemic, online school became the norm, and teachers had to quickly adapt to a new working environment and possibly even gain new skills.

Anyone that had to do online school during the pandemic has a very valuable skill. The same skill can be used to conduct training online. In many ways, it’s just like what you did during the pandemic with online school, except you won’t have to actually grade papers for students. You may not even need to do your work live!

Think about all of the classes you taught while doing online schooling. What if you had recorded a video of each of those classes? You could then offer these recordings for sale, which means you can get paid for the same work over and over again. With enough class recordings, you can even potentially retire and just collect checks from your lesson sales.

Private Tutoring

One potential way that you can work for yourself at home as a teacher is by offering private tutoring. This was traditionally done in person, but it can easily be done on the internet these days. For example, simply connecting with a student through a Zoom call would allow for private tutoring, and you can get paid instantly with an online payment system like PayPal.

Social media is likely one of the best places you can use to find paying tutoring jobs. On Facebook you can look for groups that are for parents of school aged kids or even tutoring groups. Either watch for other people to make a post searching to hire a tutor, or you could even make your own post to let others know that you’re available.

By simply setting an hourly rate for yourself and conducting tutoring online, it’s really not that difficult to earn a full-time income with this method if you’re dedicated to making it work. This can also potentially offer fast income that could be used to supplement your pay as a teacher, since you may be able to find work and get paid in the same day.

Udemy

There are two main websites that are best for teachers to use for their online side hustle: Udemy and Outschool. I’ll talk about Udemy first. This site is basically online education courses for adults. Most of the popular classes there will relate to the internet and websites.

It’s possible that this type of training may not be ideal for most teachers, since it isn’t the type of information you’ve likely been teaching to students in school. However, professors that are used to teaching college courses may potentially find Udemy to be a better fit for them. It really just depends on the subjects that you have enough knowledge about to teach to others.

Web design, marketing, photography, music, business, software, personal development and more categories can be found on this site, so it really does cover a wide variety of topics. The bottom line is that if your knowledge is more suited for adults than kids, you’ll likely be better off using Udemy as a teacher. One other major difference is that these courses are recorded videos and not actually live training.

Outschool

There is an online school and education platform called Outschool that teachers can use to make money. Classes here are performed live, so you do still interact with students. However, you get to set your own hours and prices, so you’re in control of your work schedule and your income.

For a teacher that has been working at an Elementary, Middle or High School, Outschool would allow you continue teaching the exact same classes you’ve been using at school. You would simply run those classes online instead. Each class has a set meeting day and time each week.

In many ways, Outschool won’t be much different from teaching online during the pandemic. However, you get to be your own boss and work when it’s convenient for you. For this reason, it’s actually possible to simply offer a few classes on Outschool that you teach on the weekends or evenings, and you can still work your normal teaching job. This allows you to make a second income to boost your annual earnings.