Frequently Asked Questions

You can read our vision statement by clicking here, but essentially we are trying to create a free internet school, were anyone can study from a bank of high-quality lessons.

The lessons can be created by anyone for free. TeachMyself.org then works hard to find people to sponsor lessons created by teachers and thus financially reward the schools and teachers for their hard work.

An iLesson is just what we name the lessons on TeachMyself.org

1. Primarily we need you to create iLessons and upload them to our website. This is a serious website and so we require a high standard of academic and vocational lessons, but we do not believe that only professional teachers can create these lessons. Perhaps you are a carpenter willing to put together some lessons on woodwork, or a parent willing to create a lesson which teaches young children to read, or perhaps you are bilingual and willing to create some lessons to teach those languages. Whether you are a professional or amateur teacher, we would love for you to use this site to teach the world’s children. Click here for more help in creating iLessons.

2. Secondly, you might want to consider sponsoring an iLesson that has been created on this site. Perhaps you work for a company that has an advertising budget, or perhaps you personally want to make a difference, either way you can sponsor an existing iLesson or commission further iLessons from your favourite teachers. 90% of all sponsorship money will go directly to the teacher or school who created the iLesson you sponsored, with the remaining 10% going to pay for the costs of running this not-for-profit website. Click here to contact us and find out more.

3. Thirdly, this website was built according to the principles of open source technology, so if you are an open source developer then please consider designing an application which students and teachers can use on this site to help their education. For example, you could build an application for multiple-choice exams, individual report cards, or any other creative idea you have. Contact us for more information.

4. Penultimately, if you have any ideas or suggestions on how we can better achieve our objective of universal education by 2015, then please contact us by clicking here.

5. Finally, everyone can help spread the word by encouraging your teacher friends and advertising departments to contribute and be a part of this movement.

Nothing. They are completely free. Anyone can watch them for free anytime they want. Teachers take the time to create them for free, but have the option of receiving financial sponsorship to reward their efforts.

It can be a lot of hard work for teachers to plan, create and upload high-quality iLessons to this website. As such it is important to encourage and support participating schools and teachers. One way to encourage teachers is to offer some financial reward for their hard work. As such TeachMyself.org offers individuals and companies the opportunity to sponsor specific iLessons. Your sponsorship will increase the quality, and quantity of iLessons on this website, as well as providing extra funding to participating teachers and schools.

For example, ‘J Bloggs Accountancy Company’ might decide that they wish to spend some of their yearly advertising budget on sponsoring a few lessons on TeachMyself.org. So they come to this website and choose some high quality and popular lessons that they like and then make an offer of sponsorship to those specific teachers or schools who created them. For privacy and efficiency we at TeachMyself.org will receive the offer and directly contact the respective teacher with the full information about the offer and the sponsor. It will be exclusively the teacher’s choice whether they wish to accept or reject the offer of sponsorship.

After a while J Bloggs Accountancy Company might also decide to commission a specific school or teacher to create a course book on a subject of their choosing. As such they might ask Meadowlands school’s maths department to create and maintain the ‘J Bloggs introduction to Algebra’, a course book which will be used by 14 to 16 year olds around the world to learn algebra.

Sponsorship arrangements are flexible and the value and details of each sponsorship is at the complete discretion of the sponsor and teacher. Commonly one would expect higher sponsorship to go the higher quality and most popular lessons and that most sponsors will require a recognition of their support like their company logo on the lesson page.

We guarantee that at least 90% of the sponsorship money for each lesson will go directly to the specific teacher or school. The remainder of the money goes to maintain the TeachMyself.org website. TeachMyself.org is a not-for-profit organisation which was established by volunteers investing their own money, thus any proceeds collected will go directly to the maintenance and improvement of this site, which will allow us to work hard at finding the sponsors and keeping this free education site alive.

It is very possible to achieve 5 million iLessons by 2015. As a rough guide there are 60 million professional teachers in the world, if just 1 in every 50 teachers uploaded 2 lessons a year then it would only take about two years to create 5 million iLessons.

In addition there are perhaps a further 500,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 amateur teachers who could create iLessons.

In another example, the governments of just two countries (UK and USA) currently employ about 3.5 million teachers. Therefore if those governments asked their schoolteachers to create just 2 iLessons each, then that is well over 5 million iLessons. This of course does not included the iLessons which could be added by university lecturers, teachers in private schools, retired teachers, childminders, or amateur teachers. Not to mention people in countries outside the UK and USA.

Of course there are many hurdles still to overcome, but this website stands as demonstrable proof that universal education by 2015 is possible if we have the courage to build it.

We estimate that if, by 2015, this website contains 5 million high quality lessons then it could provide an education to all children. In order to achieve this we require both professional and amateur teachers to create high quality iLessons on this site. In return participating teachers and schools receive not just the satisfaction of helping to educate the world, but also have the option of receiving financial sponsorship of their lessons.

Hence not only can you help educate the world, you can also get paid for it.

Please click here for step by step instructions on how to create a lesson.

The short answer is ‘not yet’. The reality is that we have just started and so are in the process of proving to sponsors that we can create high quality lessons that can be effective at educating children. We are certain that if you work hard to create the highest quality of iLessons now, then sponsors will follow shortly. A good analogy might be eBay, as many once thought it would be impossible to create a regular income from eBay, or any other website, however now thousands of people use eBay for a source of income.

The important point at the moment is that everything hinges on you creating the highest quality of iLesson on TeachMyself.org.

We at TeachMyself.org will work hard to find you a sponsor once you have created iLessons on this website. Alternatively you are also free to find your own sponsors, just get them to contact us here and we will organise it all.

The biggest success factor in securing sponsorship will be in the quality of your lessons. The better the lesson the higher it will be ranked, the more times it will be viewed and thus the more likely it will be that sponsors will wish to reward your efforts.

If you are thinking about sponsoring a teacher’s iLesson then please contact with us here and we will be happy to answer all your questions and assist you through the process. You can also read more about sponsoring lessons by clicking here

This is a completely free website, where anyone can use any of the lessons. We anticipate there will be numerous different people who find TeachMyself.org very useful.

1. If you are a student in full time education: You can use our lessons to supplement your existing studies. Either on your own or with the assistance of teachers and parents.
2. If you are a student not in full time education: You can use our lessons as a main source of your education.
3. If you operate a school without sufficient specialist teachers: This website could be used in this situation to provide specialist lessons that your current teachers cannot provide. For example if you operate a school in a remote part of the Australian Outback that does not have specialist science teachers then you could have the children progress through a course of science lessons on TeachMyself.org.
4. You are a charity, NGO or government who is building a school: The worlds governments are all signed up to the United Nations Development goals of achieving universal education by 2015. As such there will be a requirement for many additional education facilities to be created over the coming years, and with the current scarcity of funding, TeachMyself.org can be used to greatly reduce the CAPEX and OPEX costs of establishing and operating a school. We at TeachMyself.org would love to hear from you and discuss what lessons and functionality we can add to our website to help you achieve your goals.

TeachMyself.org will not directly supply internet access to the world’s poorest children. The ambition is to create a platform of high quality iLessons that make governments and charities realise that each nation can greatly improve access to education by providing all of its children with internet access. There are many projects which are independently already attempting to deliver internet access to the worlds poorest children, for example the ‘One Child per Laptop project’

The prospect of structured schools, staffed by local people, with much of the specialist teaching delivered over the internet, is not the perfect education, but in many places in the world it is the only practically achievable type. It will also be enough for many families and communities to break the cycle of illiteracy, poverty and desperation which keeps their children uneducated.

A course book is an organised collection of iLessons. Aranged by a teacher to offer students a progression of iLessons around a central subject. For example, an ilesson might be ‘An introduction to photosynthesis’, whilst a Course Book might be ‘An introduction to Biology’ and thus include the photosynthesis lesson as one of its component iLessons.

Anyone can create a Course Book, but they obviously take more time and effort to successfully create and maintain then single iLessons. As such if you wish to construct a Course Book please contact us for help and assistance getting started

This website requires a way of categorising iLessons according to their general subject area. The temptation is to just keep adding more and more subject areas to the list, but with long lists there is a danger of students searching for iLessons under the wrong subject heading. As such the subject list is short, but there is the option to further tag/label the iLessons with key words. For example, an iLesson filled under the subject heading of mathematics, can be further tagged with trigonometry, algebra, circles, multiplication, or any other label that will help students find the iLesson they require.

We feel that we have the subject list about right, but if you feel strongly that a subject area which should be added or removed then please click here to contact us.