10 Part-Time Online Teaching Jobs For A Great Side Hustle

Written by Jason Michaels Last Updated: May 8, 2024

Looking for extra money but have a work schedule that doesn’t suit having a second job? Get a side job teaching others what you know.

You can teach pretty much anything – skills you use at work, a musical instrument you play, a hobby you enjoy, another language, or just teaching English.

There are many bonuses to having a teaching side job:

• You can set your own Schedule (very few availability requirements).
• You can set your own Prices (for most of these places).
• Many do not require a teaching certificate (some require higher education and/or qualification tests).
• Can be done on-line, in your home, at the student’s home, or in a public spot (library, coffeeshop or other safe space).
• Few (if any) additional expenses needed. These listed are free to sign up.
• Teach any way you’re comfortable with and create your own lesson curriculum. Only one site requires you to use their lesson plan.
• Sites track schedules, invoices and payments for you – just show up and teach.

With that said, let’s get started. Here’s a list of 10 part-time online teaching jobs.

1. TakeLessons

Almost any subject can be taught on TakeLessons – academic courses, music lessons, singing, drama, hobbies and languages. You can set your own hours, teach more than one subject, set class duration times, set your own prices and place of lessons.

They have their own online “classroom” available with camera access, screen sharing, recording option (for students to review later) and a text chat.

They offer two packages to students:

• A set schedule time slot (for however many times a week they wish)
• a “schedule as you go” option (great for students with changing work schedules)

These packages must be purchased in sets of 5 lessons each and don’t offer a one-time “introductory” lesson option.

You get paid every week (usually Thursdays) directly to your bank account.

Their pay tier is as follows:

• The first 5 lessons with a student you keep 60% of the lesson fee
• This increases by 10% with each set of 5 lessons (with the same student) until after their 15th lesson where you’ll keep 90% of the lesson fee.
• They do offer an option where you book your own students through them and they only handle the billing and payments – the fee then is only 7.9% of the lesson cost.

2. iTalki

This site is for learning languages, so if you speak more than one language “natively” or at advanced levels, you can teach them all here. They offer over 75+ languages including several sign languages.

There are two types of “teachers” here:

Professional: If you have teaching experience or training you can choose this option. They will require you to upload documents proving your experience and training.

Community: If you just know another language skillfully, you can teach in a casual, informal teaching and practice session.

You can offer your own prices, several time durations and a“trial” lesson, and after getting established you then can offer “on demand” tutoring.

You teach on Skype, Google Hangouts, or any other VoiP program. iTalki takes care of the scheduling and billing and their fee is 15% of a lesson fee. You are paid in “iTalki Credits” which can be used to pay for your own language lessons here, or requested for withdrawal.

Withdrawal payments  are made within 10 days after the 1st and the 15th of the month (depending on when your request was made). They have several payment options (with their own fees) such as Check, PayPal, Payoneer, AliPay, Skrill or Bank Payment (through Payoneer).

3. Cambly

If you’re a native English speaker and don’t have, or don’t want to teach, any other skills, you can use Cambly.

Their platform is a bit different from other tutoring sites as you set your “priority hours” (availability), but anytime you’re logged in you’ll receive “calls” from students through their Cambly App and you can choose to accept or reject them.

Again, the sessions are done through videos and there is a chat box for when students are “stuck” for a word, they can type it in their native language to be translated.

The calls can vary in length from a few minutes to an hour or more, depending on what the student requests. You’ll earn $0.17 USD per minute (or $10.20/hour) and you’re paid every Monday via Paypal.

4. VIPKID

This is another site for teaching English online, except it’s to Chinese children in China. VIPKids provide everything you’ll need – lesson materials, tech support and administrative support.

They require you to be available for at least 7½ hours a week and you teach children English as well as American culture and American traditions.

The classes are scheduled early morning or late evenings because of the time difference, which could work perfectly around your regular 9-5 job. Each lesson is 30 minutes and you’ll earn a minimum of $7-9 per lesson, plus extras.

Your minimum is determined by your “demo lesson” and experience. You are paid once a month between the 10th and 15th by bank deposit.

5. Chegg

Chegg has a different operating method than the others I’ve mentioned. There’s no calendar for you to set your availability. You log in when you’re available and change your setting to “Available now” and wait for students to contact you.

The annoying thing is that this setting resets itself after 20 minutes and an alert pops up “Are you still available”.

You’ll also get email notifications from students requesting lessons and you have a very short period of time to respond.

Another inflexibility is that they pay $20 an hour no matter your experience or topics taught. The rate is applied to the exact number of minutes accumulated during a given week and paid through PayPal every Thursday.

6. Tutor

Tutor.com is for academic courses and you provide homework help. They have a strict acceptance policy. You do need to have completed higher education degrees and pass their proficiency exams.

You can set your own schedule, but you need to be available for at least 5 hours a week. You are paid a set hourly rate dictated by the subjects you tutor plus incentives for high-quality tutoring.

The site says their pay schedule will be “revealed” after you’ve passed their application process. But after reviewing online, you are paid about $9 – 13 an hour plus extras, I couldn’t find out how or when you are paid.

7. Wyzant

Wyzant claims to be the “nation’s largest community of professional tutors”. They have a multitude of subjects you can tutor in but the approval process varies by subject.

For some subjects, you need to complete a brief proficiency quiz. For others, you’ll need to submit your written qualifications for tutoring that subject.

You can set your own schedule, teach online or offsite, set your own hourly price and their service fee is based on the number of hours you’ve tutored with them:

• 0-20 hours of tutoring Fee: 40% of each lesson
• 21-50 hours of tutoring Fee: 35% of each lesson
• 51-200 hours Fee: 30%
• 201-400 hours Fee: 25%
• 400+ hours Fee: 20%

So that’s the drawback, you’ll need to work many hours to gain the most profit from them. You could raise your hourly rate to make up for this, but then that may discourage students from signing up with you. Payments are sent by check or direct deposit.

8. Udemy

There’s a little more work involved here as you need to create your own teaching videos, slideshows, and any other teaching materials and edit them all.

The plus side is that you only need to do this once (plus the occasional upgrade), and your lessons can sell over and over again without little help from you. You can have a great source of passive income without a lot of effort involved after the initial production.

You set your course price from $20 – $200 each and Udemy has several fee tiers:

• Students who buy your lessons through your “instructor coupon” – you keep 97% of the lesson price
• Students who buy your lessons through Udemy’s marketing links – you keep 50% of the lesson price
• Students who buy your lessons through Udemy’s Affiliate Marketing links – you keep 25% of the lesson price.

Basically, the more work you put into marketing your own courses the more profit you’ll make. Revenues are paid through PayPal and Payoneer.

9. SkillShare

Skillshare is another lesson selling site similar to Udemy. Again you need to put in the work creating your instructional videos. They’re different from Udemy as they sell a subscription plan to students which gives them unlimited access to classes.

You earn money two different ways:

• Earn Premium Referrals: Get $10 for every student you bring to Skillshare that signs up for a Premium Membership.
• Earn Royalties: Earn royalties based on the number of minutes watched in your classes every month.

Again, the more effort you put into marketing your courses, the more you can make. You receive your revenues through Paypal on the 16th of the following month. Meaning all the referrals and minutes watched from October 1 – October 31 will be paid on November 16th.

10. Your own Website

This is much more time extensive, but is also possible to make more profit as there’s no middleman chomping at your revenues.

Make a new site, or add a page to your existing site and offer lessons in whatever topic you wish and get paid through Paypal (there may be some fees applicable here though). It’s a good idea to research what topics are in high demand and chose to teach those.

There’s a variety of ways you can teach:

• Use your marketing material, profile links, and “codes” from your other teaching sites to be redirected to that site.
• Use the same videos you used on Udemy and SkillShare.
• Offer a live one-on-one session through Google Classroom or other web Voip service.
• Offer Webinars through group video (Such as Facebook Messenger, GoToMeeting or other online video groups).
• Create an email course opt-in where students can buy an email course to be read, watched or completed in their inbox.

There are many website widgets available to make this easy – calendars, booking widgets, schedulers, marketing widgets, payment handling, and so many more.

Final Thoughts

The best part about teaching from home is that you do not need to limit yourself to one company. Join several of them and accept students from several of them. After a while, find out where you’re getting the most students from and then delete the accounts that are not garnering any results.

You are an independent contractor, not an employee of any of these companies so you do not get any employee benefits or other fringes that come with a job position. You receive a 1099 tax form to claim on your income taxes.

The only drawback to this side job is having to managing the various calendars from all the site platforms and making sure there’s no overlap of scheduled lessons.

Please note, there are many more tutoring sites available out there. I did not list a few due to either charging outrageous prices or having very stringent acceptance processes (including passing “mock lessons” and personality tests).

After all, you want to make money quickly and easily, not jump through endless hoops to get accepted, or work for pennies while the company greedily profits off your hard work. (Varsity Tutor for example – charges students $50-70 an hour per lesson while the tutor only receives about $13 an hour).

Some sites claim that tutors are able to earn full-time incomes (Skillshare claims you could make $40,000 a year). But the more reasonable revenues are a couple hundred dollars a month.

In any case, teaching from home on your computer, tablet or smartphone is a great way of earning some money in your spare time. If you know of any other sites, please let us know in the comments below. Thanks for reading and happy frugaling!