One of my favorite things about language education is that it’s a complete free-for-all. No one cares where you studied or how many books your instructors have published. Results are all that matter (unless, of course, you’re planning to become a professor yourself). Students have their own objectives in mind when they take language courses, and the only assessments that matter to them are the ones they pass or fail in the real world:

• Can I tell a Brazilian taxi driver where I need to go?
• Can I discuss controversial political issues with my German friends?
• Can I tell a Spanish-speaking parent how to treat her child’s illness?
• Can I translate this brochure to Chinese in time to send it to the printer?

I like to think of foreign-language education as a sort of wild frontier where pedigrees are meaningless—where fortune favors the bold and there are a thousand ways to strike it rich. It’s the Wild West of educational technology, which means there’s plenty of room for mavericks and snake-oil salesmen. Because students have so many options when it comes to studying a language, professors have to work extra hard to prove their time is worth more than a box of listen-and-repeat lessons. In addition, they have to compete with more polished and engaging self-paced options like Rosetta Stone and teachers in foreign countries willing to offer immersion courses for a fraction of the cost of a typical college course in the States.

If all that wasn’t challenging enough, now there’s eduFire.com. The site allows teachers to offer live lessons via video, with some courses providing as many contact hours as a typical college course. On eduFire, teachers are referred to as tutors, classes are small, and lessons typically cost ten to twenty dollars per hour. Students can also rate tutors, creating more demand for the most reputable tutors and allowing them to charge more for their services.

So how do foreign-language professors compete with a live teacher who is willing to offer more personal attention at a 90 percent discount to the cost of a typical college course? There are essentially two options:

1) Offer a degree. For some students, the main reason to take a foreign language course in college is because it satisfies requirements for a degree. In this model, all students really care about are a handful of classes that relate to their major, and their standards for all other courses are relatively low. They believe that much of their college experience will be dominated by coursework they don’t enjoy or find useful, but they accept it as a necessary evil.

2) Offer a superior learning experience. For students who are passionate about learning the subject matter, a great teacher may actually be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars more per course. If a great professor can teach students what they need to know ten times faster than a student could learn it through some other means, then the professor’s time should at least be worth ten times the cost of the alternative.

For now, sites like eduFire still feel like unstructured, wobbly imitations of the online-learning experiences offered by accredited institutions. But it’s not hard to imagine these sites becoming  serious competitors in the language-education marketplace. As more users try out the site and rate their teachers, the best tutors will make more money. As compensation rises, the site will attract better instructors. Better instructors will attract more serious students and the whole process snowballs from there.

As a part-time Web-site-design professor, I’m all too familiar with this trend. My students have a nearly limitless supply of educational resources available to them, from free online tutorials to highly polished sites like lynda.com, which charges twenty-five dollars per month and provides access to thousands of video tutorials covering hundreds of technology-related topics. When I teach, I have to ask myself, “How can I make sure my students get their money’s worth? What can I provide that they can’t get anywhere else?” It might seem idealistic to think that I can offer my students something no one else can, but I think it’s a good goal to strive for. With that in mind, here are a few mantras I’ve adopted in my quest to ensure that what I teach can’t be outsourced or undersold.

• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Recognize when someone else has done something better than I can (or at least as well as I can). Take what they’ve done and build on it.
• Reinvent the wheel. Recognize when I’m better off building my own resources. Don’t waste too much time trying to revise material that isn’t great to begin with. Ask God to grant me the patience to accept the textbooks I can’t change, the courage to change the resources I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
• Provide at least one priceless lesson per class. During each class, I try to identify at least one “million-dollar moment” and I build it up before revealing it. It might be a tip I wish someone had given me while I was in school before I spent five years doing something the hard way. I might announce that I’m about to show the one technique typographers use the most to make text look more polished. During project critiques, I might point out a common design pitfall that separates amateur designers from professionals. The goal is to show students that every class includes at least one lesson that was worth getting out of bed for. Or, in the case of my online students who may be participating while lying in bed, they should at least feel that each week’s content was worth waking up for. (And yes, sometimes these million-dollar moments wind up feeling more like they belong in a ninety-nine-cent store, and I feel silly for over-hyping them. But even a ninety-nine-cent moment is better than no moment.)
• Be a good filter. Distill an overwhelming body of information and resources down to the most useful parts students need.
• Be a good prioritizer. Filter everything; then filter it again by putting the most important information first. Assume your students will read half of what you put in front of them; then assume they’ll only remember the first half of that.
• Be a good coach. Good coaches don’t just provide information. They provide guidance, motivation, criticism, and praise. They bring out the best in students by helping them believe in themselves, demand more from themselves, and tap into their own talents.