When ALTs want to share their teaching materials with others, should they put a price tag?

8 comments

1. I mean, the two no answers aren’t very good.

   But for me: Just no. Real teachers put good material online to help others, so why should ALTs try and charge for games, simple lessons, etc. Now if you’re making large curriculum plans than yes, you should charge for it.

2. There is enough stuff online for free anyways, but a trade is always nice eg Ive got this lesson on xxxxx, but i struggle with yyyyy, do you have anything?

3. I sell stuff on Teachers Pay Teachers and don’t see any problem with ALTs doing the same if their work is high quality. Yes, a lot of ALTs are poor, but a lot of them are also trust fund kiddies who throw money at problems, so you might get a few bucks every year.

   As for the actual BOE paying, I think not. They pay you to be an ALT, and part of that job is preparing lesson materials. In fact, many contracts explicitly state that any materials you make at work are the intellectual property of your BOE or company, so selling things you make on their time could get you into legal trouble if you aren’t careful.

4. It’s up to each individual person and I don’t think there is a “should” to push onto others here. If they want to put a price tag on it, they have every right to do that as long as the idea and material are theirs and not stolen.

   You could also potentially make profit by giving them away for free but having a patreon, or using word of mouth to get students.

5. Nah. https://www.altopedia.net/ is free and to be honest, I don’t think half of the stuff the average ALT would produce is as good as they think it is and I would pay a single yen for a mediocre worksheet that I can make a better version of. Or, you know, maybe just craft a good lesson that doesn’t rely on a bunch of handouts.

6. This would really depend on the nature and quality of the materials.

   I’ve never worked as an ALT, but I’ve worked alongside them in various random gigs. And some of them have produced some quite solid, albeit event specific, materials. So I it’s hard to dismiss the potential value out of hand.

   I can’t imagine paying money for some generic .zip file of sentence scrambles, but if someone were to throw together a good set of materials, especially if they were made using tools I don’t have or don’t know how to use, I’d at least give it a look.

7. I doubt many people would want to pay money for materials made by untrained teachers who have no real experience with material design on a professional level.

   The worksheets I’ve seen that were made by ALTs are usually just grammar-based, fill-in-the-blank sentences, flashcards, and the like, and are really only usable by the person who made them.

   Besides that, when you make materials for your school, the school then owns them. This is because making lesson plans, worksheets, and games is all part of your job, which means the school is already paying you for making them and they are only to be used for the benefit of the school.

   This is usually written into your work contract, so technically speaking, if you tried to publish what you’ve created during your work hours for your school, they could sue you.

   I doubt that would happen, but you should be aware of this – and it sounds like a lot of people are not.

8. If you can create materials that provide enough value for someone to pay for them (either the school/BOE or the ALTs themselves) then go for it (but make sure you have the right visa to sell stuff on the side).

   If you are doing this on the clock then the materials probably belong to your employer.