Thomas J. West Music

A fellow member of the Music Professional Learning Network forwarded me an email from the founder of a new online service that connects music teachers with music students for online webcam lessons. ZipLesson is a free service for both teachers and students that makes it very easy for teachers to publish their availability and set their rates and for students to pay for and attend lessons via Skype.

Teacher Profiles And Calendar

Teachers can, free of charge, create a profile within the ZipLesson directory that is completely customizable with basic html features. They set their own hourly rate and can offer half-hour and/or full hour lessons at an hourly rate. They enter their availability on their personal calendar and provide their PayPal email address to get paid. When a student selects a time from their calendar, the teacher confirms that they are still available at that time, and the student pays for the lesson via PayPal. ZipLessons makes its money by charging teachers a 10% service fee.

I created my own profile on the service and entered my current availablility.

Students Browse Teachers, Pay For Lessons, And Connect

Students can browse ZipLessons fully searchable teacher listings, find a potential teacher, review their profile, select a lesson slot from their calendar, request a lesson, pay via PayPal, and even connect directly to the teacher on the ZipLessons site via Skype when it's time to attend the lesson. It's a brilliantly simple concept.

ZipLesson has been in development over the course of this summer and went live approximately a month ago. Already, there are 50 music teachers who have added their profile to the listings. A quick trip through the listings will reveal some very accomplished and high quality instructors.

Here's their demonstration video on YouTube:

A Growing Web Service

ZipLessons reminds me a great deal of Skype's ill-fated Skype Prime service. Skype originally provided independent service providers a listing in the Skype Prime directory and allowed potential clients to use Skype Credit to pay for service calls. I listed my webcam music lessons service and did not  get a single student (or even a single inquiry) after trying it for two months. ZipLesson can succeed where Skype Prime failed for two very simple reasons:

1. It's 2011, not 2009. Online learning is taking a hold and becoming a more and more accepted and viable way for people to learn. Webcam music lessons are still not in the general public's acceptance, but with the growing trend of online students in cyber charter schools and other hybrid modes of learning, services like ZipLesson are in on the ground floor (if they can wait for society to catch up).
2. Unlike Skype Prime, which was a huge listing for all kinds of different service providers, ZipLesson targets a niche market of private music lessons with Skype as a medium - a concept which is by far the most common way for teachers and students to connect online.

There are definite improvements and enhancements to be made to the fledgling service, the most pressing improvement being more flexible functionality for the teacher calendar entry. I have contacted the folks behind the scenes with several suggestions.

I will be interested to see how the service develops over time and hope that it will bring me a few new students. As I have done with other online music education resources, I will continue to update my readers as time goes on. You can follow ZipLesson's progress youself by "liking" their Facebook page and following them on Twitter.

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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