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Writer's pictureAhmet Öztel

How to Become a Freelancer Teacher

In 2017, After graduating from İstanbul Bilgi University, I started to work as an English teacher in several private schools. In 2020 I was tired of working as an English teacher in private schools in Türkiye. The salary was low, the responsibility was too much to handle as you had to report every single behavior of every single student to every single parent. Most of my colleagues had the same complaints but what could be done?


Luckily, I had the courage to be against to this system and started teaching Turkish online. I taught Turkish during my bachelor's degree at İstanbul Bilgi University, so it was easy for me to adapt. In 2020, I was learning Spanish online, and my Spanish teacher was taking private lessons from me. She loved the way I teach Turkish and then told me to start my own online school just like her. I liked the idea and started working on my own Turkish learning community. I started with a Facebook group. I came up with the name Turkish Language 101. I advertised some free online workshops in order to get more people into my little growing community. After some workshops, I got some requests for group courses and I decided to advertise my group courses in my group and other expat groups. Finally, I had enough people to start my classes. The course fee was very cheap, even one of my students who bought the course thought it was a scam, but still bought it as it was so cheap. When he took the first semester with me, he was surprised by how organized and well-built the course was. He suggested that I should create my own website so that my advertisements look more professional just like my classes. First, I had to come up with an original name. Getting help from my student, we ended up with the name "Turkish Academy", and I bought the domain www.turkish.academy for 15$.


Then it was time to choose the software to build the website. I used WordPress when I was teaching Turkish at Bilgi TÜRMER, but I've made adjustments to an already-built website. I had to choose something user-friendly. One day when I was watching a video on YouTube, I saw an advertisement about Wix. I did some research and thought that it would be a good idea to build my website on Wix.


I spent 2 months watching YouTube videos on how to build a website on Wix. Therefore, I built https://www.turkish.academy/ . I'm going to be very honest, I loved the website that I came up with. I've heard many compliments about how good it looked. I even had a compliment for a Wix customer care service. Wix also allowed me to create my own logo design with its logo-making software. I again came up with a design that got lots of compliments from my friends and colleagues. The first and last versions have similarities but this version is the last version I came up with.


I created Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Linkedin, TrustPilot pages for my website. Connected my website with these social media platforms in order to help my followers visit my website easily.


I built a "Learn Turkish" page in my website in order to provide Turkish learners with my service and free Turkish materials. https://www.turkish.academy/learn-turkish


I officialized my academy on January 6th 2021. Became an official institute in Türkiye.


In 2022, I was awarded the Fulbright FLTA scholarship and had a chance to teach Turkish at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, New York University.

In 2023, I finished my scholarship program and came back to Turkiye and continued teaching Turkish to people all over the world at Turkish Academy.


2023 will be a fresh starter for me and I'm working on different projects such as weekly workshops ( https://www.turkish.academy/workshops ) and Flashcards for Turkish learners. The weekly workshops are going to be for every level and will push me to create more materials for Turkish learning.


To be continued...

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