Problems for tutors / content providers

Updates, Tips and Known Issues
41

A few points here:

  1. There are some tutors who regularly make enough points through tutoring to cash in every month. These are mostly tutors of English. Some of these tutors are not studying other languages, but are excellent tutors. I respect this, and hope that we will eventually have enough demand in the other languages so that more tutors can “make a living” as tutors.

  2. We confiscate points to encourage more activity, more writing and speaking. We have seen what happens when there is no urgency. People hoard points and activity declines. This means less work for the tutors,which is not in the interest of our community.

  3. We would rather not keep the points that are confiscated, and therefore prefer to offer them as a bonus to content providers.

  4. I am quite convinced that most content providers do so out of a spirit of sharing and cooperation as part of this community. At the same time I am happy to be able to offer the slight additional incentive of points, even thought the system is far from perfect, and for some, confusing.

  5. Edwin, I am quite convinced that most of our tutors are also motivated mostly by the desire to help others. What is discouraging to them is lack of activity. Many tutors regularly post discussion times and no one comes. We are looking at what we can do to increase activity, increase output language learning activities, namely speaking and writing, at LingQ. This means a more flexible approach to scheduling discussions, more incentive to writing, and a way to make it easier to use the words we have learned in writing and speaking.

Helen has made some suggestions in this regard and we look forward to hearing more ideas.

Ultimately, more members, more active members, more writing and speaking, all of this is what we want to aim for. Trying to achieve absolute fairness in the distribution of points is neither achievable nor an area where we want to concentrate resources.

42

@SolYViento - The comments are actually both for making comments and for asking questions about the lesson but mostly for asking questions about the lesson. The “random forum posts” are questions about the lesson and are perfectly valid forum posts on a language learning site. They are done this way so that they are visible for other members to answer on the Ask a Tutor forums. Then, the next learner who studies that lesson can see all existing forum posts about that lesson.

43

@Steve: For those tutors who are after the points, I can understand why they become frustrated. If I were one of those who purely want to help others, the only tiny frustration I would find is that I have to manually created the time slots.

If this is the case, there is a simple solution. Give the tutors an checkbox option to let the learners arrange the time. So in the Speaking section, there will be a list of tutors available, but are marked as ‘Learner, please arrange a time with this tutor’.

I post myself as a tutor in another language learning site. Once in a while, someone might contact me. Otherwise, I don’t feel frustrated. I leave the post there and forget it.

44

@edwin - Which tutors are not after the points (as well as helping others)?

45

doo: “People are upset because they subscribe to some theory of labour equating effort with value”

doo, you’re so right!!.

The way things work right now with awarding points for lessons:

Lingq encourages–> Very short lessons for beginners. Copy-pasted lessons (that you can find for free in lots of other places). So this is what the library will end up having.

Lingq discourages—> lessons unique to Lingq. Exclusive transcriptions, exclusive audio or both. It also discourages lessons that last more than 3 minutes.

So this discourages me from making more lessons. That’s why I’m not (and won’t be) making any more lessons.

I feel utterly stupid now, having spent so many hours making my lessons and seeing how smart people with 20 times less effort make 20 times more points from their lessons. They were fun to make at the beginning but after some time you want to feel rewarded a bit. And giving the same amount of points for a 30 second lesson as for an 18 minute lesson that took you 3 hours to make… that’s too unbalanced.

Anyway this is not a tantrum, this is how things work and I accept it. And I behave accordingly. No big deal really!

doo: “or they mistakenly think points = money”

You’re correct again!. At least for the tutoring I thought it was, to some extent.

solyviento said: “I think tutoring will never make business sense to most people: It’s somewhat an act of charity for most tutors.”.

You definitely don’t do it for the money (effort≠value). But at least I could make a little bit of extra cash from tutoring, leaving aside some points for conversations in the languages that I’m learning.

If I’m not going to be able to cash in any points (because I can’t reach 10.000 points in 3 months) then I’d be better off not tutoring. So I’ll just offer a few hours a month so I can pay for the few conversations I want to have in the languages I’m learning. The last month has been very bad, in terms of requests for tutoring, so maybe it’s time to go to plan B sooner than I thought.

Don`t get me wrong I still love Lingq despite its many weaknesses, and I hope the site will last forever and ever and ever and ever… :stuck_out_tongue:

46

As I have said, the biggest problem is the lack of demand for tutoring services. Providing content is a way to attract tutors, but if the total number of learners is small, the incentive is small. We need to focus our efforts on increasing the number of members and encouraging more members to engage with tutors.

As far as the fairness of the content points allocation is concerned, there are two major problems which prevent us from making the system more equitable.

  1. To create a system that allocates points based on effort would be complicated and it is not an area where we want to spend programming resources. Whatever we do, there will be complaints.

  2. It is difficult to pay on a differential scale for lessons that all have the same value, zero. We started out allowing content providers to charge what they wanted for their content. We found that people did not want to pay for content.

47

When I started with LingQ, I was quite enthusiastic about getting points.
I started to create transcripts of some quite good CC licensed lesson audios that I downloaded years ago that are now not easily to access. I transcribed 80 lessons this way (incl. checking and “cleaning” the audios). They were successful (in total > 3000 usages), although I received nearly zero feedback.
Then I was rewarded: Nov. 2010 till Apr. 2011 = 868 / 1512 / 2037 / 2291 / 893 / 694 points.
Now my problem was to find suitable tutors for my learning in a certain time frame of the day.
It was and it is still very difficult. In Chinese it’s nearly zero, and in French I don’t yet feel ready to speak a lot, and correction or report quality is very varying. I was not always happy with the reports.
So I start losing points, even points for corrections and talks I did and I worked hard for (I send always very detailed reports plus a recording).
My conclusion: the tutoring work and the work of transcribing & uploading lessons is not worth it. A few weeks ago I stopped all this. Another reason was that the rewarded points went down from month to month…
Don’t get me wrong. I still love LingQ’s reading and listening features. But the whole tutoring and point system is not attractive for me. I invested too much time and received nearly nothing.

48

I think a better approach is tot allow the creator of lessons to charge points INSTEAD OF money for his/her lessons.

For example, the creator can decide to charge a simbolic amount like 1 point or 5 points per lesson or just to leave the lessons for free (or maybe the first 5 lessons for free and the rest of the collection 2 points per lesson).

In this way everybody can decide what is the value of their lessons and it’s much easier for the users to spend points that are going to expire. It’s like micropayments and it’s very flexible.
Anyway, the creator can decide just to give all his/her the lessons for free like now if he/she wants to contribute for the sake of helping other people.

49

I definitely like that idea, Oscar.

I think it’d encourage people to work really hard on better content too if they can charge points for it.

50

Oscar, that is essentially what we did before and people did not want to spend points for content as long as free content was available. However, many things have changed and maybe we should look at this again in some way. Please keep the ideas coming.

51

I think you could make it mandatory to spend minimum 5 points/lesson. Though you may lose some current freeloaders.

52

Well, 5 points is a pretty small sacrifice, but wouldn’t that make the site completely unusable for free users?

I think the idea behind free members is to get them in and seeing the site so they know if they want to upgrade or not.

53

I understand the issue Steve.

If you charge 100 or 200 points for a single lesson just a very tiny percentage of people are going to pay for it, but if the charge is simbolic, like 1 point, 2 points or 5 points per lesson (the decision is up to the creator), it doesn’t seem to me people are not going to take the lesson just because they have to use very few points of his account (but maybe I am naive here).

54

"I think the idea behind free members is to get them in and seeing the site so they know if they want to upgrade or not. "

I think the mentality of most is that if it ain’t free, they ain’t buyin’.

Other who are sincerely looking can still import their own lessons at the free level. Maybe 10 particular lessons per language can be designated as “free” .

55

Problem is that I’ve got only permission for sharing podcasts if they were offered for free on LingQ! Same is for all lessons from sources under a Creative Common Licence. If you change this LingQ have to delete a huge number of lessons. This is not a problem for me for the Librivox, the VOA and Ello content but for all the podcasts that I transcribed by hand.

56

Vera, for the content under Creative Commons a solution would be to allow for free to download the content (fullfilling the license). But if you want to open it on LingQ and getting the transcription (created by you), then charging points could be possible, because you are charging for the transcription not for the content itself (which you can download for free).

57

We are not against allowing people to charge a fee for their lessons. It could be a way to value your content more highly if others are willing to pay. Keep in mind that any audio must continue to be made available freely and it will really only be the transcript that the user will have to pay for. This is because there are restrictions on using the mp3 format and we would have to pay a fee if we charge for mp3 downloads which we don’t want to do.

58

Another interesting fact of allowing users to charge their own lessons is that is a way to stimulate niches within the library.

For example, let’s say only a small amount of users like the new Zeland accent and they would like to study English with it, but they find very difficult to find content with that accent. In this case, they may be willing to spend a little more points for this rare content. In this way the contributor would be better compensated in spite of less popularity of his/her lessons.

By the way, all the time I am talking about very small quantities of points (sometimes symbolic) per lesson. I am not defending a total change of the system towards a paying system.

59

I think the idea sounds interesting. One issue though, it would be excluding paying members who don’t regularly buy points or offer tutoring services. Unless the $10/month fee somehow incorporates a handful of points (e.g. 25-50).

60

Are we discussing charging points for content? Like Steve said, LingQ has tried this before and it did not go well. So they decided to keep all content free to the learners.

Please, fellow LingQ-ers. This is the law under the science of Internet economy. Content itself ‘wants’ to be free. LingQ did not believe it at first. They tried and it did not work. Why are we going back?

If you want to understand more about the economy of ‘free’, read Chris Anderson’s book ‘Free’.