In this recent Mashable post about The Future of Teaching, Josh mentions that online learning environments have been shown to be more effective than face to face teaching. I’ve been talking about this for years – it is not in the future, it is now. I and many others are already doing this.

A simple way to start teaching online is to post a video of yourself on YouTube or create a blog with educational blog posts, or post to your Facebook page, etc. Or you can start using video chats like Skype or MSN Live Messenger to teach students via webcam. But the most exciting approach is to create your own online learning environment.

An online learning environment is typically a members-only area that not only contains content in a variety of formats (such as video, audio, text, diagrams), but often creates an online community with fosters collaboration. For example, this could be a discussion forum where students can discuss the course content, or where you accept submissions of assignments via a student section. It’s a great place to put all your content, and organize your thoughts and overall systematic approach to your content. You charge a monthly fee for access, and continually add more content and refine existing content.

To actually implement this, you could use open source virtual learning environment software such as Moodle (free). You can often get this software installed easily via your web host, such as GoDaddy or Hostgator. There are many free applications that these hosts provide with easy one click installations so that you don’t have to set up databases or ftp a ton of files to the server.

After trying Moodle for a while, I decided to go with Wordpress (free) which I am very familiar with for all my websites. You can structure a series of web pages in a hierarchy – so I have 7 courses with several lessons within each course. These are known as subpages. Moodle didn’t have a very good integration with any payments systems which became a problem and had lots of extra things I didn’t need. So I am now using Wordpress with the Wishlist Member plugin to protect my pages, send emails to members, take payments (via Paypal) and integrate with my email autoresponder (GetResponse).

With online learning exploding in growth these days, many teachers have started to teach online. It can give you access to students around the globe, and help you make some extra money. And everyone can use some help in that area these days!

However, most teachers tend to look to other websites to start teaching, whether it be an online university or some other teaching site. The problem is these sites usually take a nice cut of the profits and they also control the community of students. If they shut down or remove you, you’re back to square one.

With the amazing tools available now on the Internet, it’s easier than ever to create your own music teaching website or any other subject for that matter. Free software like Wordpress makes it easy to create and edit your own web pages without knowing how to code.

Assuming you want to charge students for your courses (a good idea) you will need to protect your pages and also take payments. This is easy to do with Wordpress and Paypal can be used to take payments. All you need to do is cut and paste a bit of html onto your page and you can be taking payments, even recurring monthly payments (also known as subscriptions).

If you want to build and control your own community of students (highly recommended), you will also need an email autoresponder such as AWeber.

One final piece of advice – set up a quick membership site with a bit of content and try to get sales. Don’t build a huge site only to find out you can’t get anyone to buy.