Yariv Binnun, Co-CEO

Hello,  My name is Yariv Binnun and I am the co-founder and co-CEO of eTeacher Group. 10 years ago my brother Boaz and I founded eTeacher with the aim of creating an electronic arena that will enable teachers and students to meet and communicate online. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then and we have come a long way. Today eTeacher is one of the largest online language schools, employing hundreds of teachers and serving thousands of students from all over the world.  

Every week, our students log on to a virtual classroom, from their homes, where they meet their teacher through video conferencing technology. Our teachers, which live in different countries, also log on and teach the lesson from home. So, a Chinese lesson is taught by a teacher in Beijing, an English lesson is taught by a teacher in the USA and a Hebrew lesson is taught by a teacher in Israel. But I’ll talk more about that later.  

This blog is for anyone interested in e-learning, online education and distance learning entrepreneurs. Once a week, here in this blog, we will share our thoughts, ideas, executive dilemmas and stories from the world of online learning. As pioneers in this field, we feel it is our mission to “spread the word”, if you will, of distance learning. We live and breathe this topic every day, in our marketing, sales and program management. And now, through sharing our experience and knowhow to anyone who is interested.  

So, to start off – today I will briefly share the story of how eTeacher was founded.  

eTeacher was founded in the year 2000. Our initial idea was to take the eBay concept and apply it to private tutoring; an open arena where any teacher can offer their services and students can choose any teacher for their private lessons. Our intention was to take a commission for every transaction but not to directly employ the teachers. The website went live in 2001; teachers started signing up and even conducted video chats with students for a fee. However, very quickly it became apparent to us that we will not be able to make money based on this model. Traffic was too low and the internet in those days was way too slow.  

So, we made the required changes and in a short time the website became a regular private tutoring service. The company employed teachers who went from house to house and gave private lessons while the website was used only for advertising.  

Then, in 2002 the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a tender for a virtual online school to teach children of Israeli diplomats all over the world reading and writing through the internet.  

We realized the great potential of this project, submitted our offer and won the tender.  Within two months we started offering live online lessons to 300 students in dozens of countries. Today, 8 years later, we are still running this one-of-a-kind program. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is an international pioneer in this field and as far as I know is the only one in the world running such a program.  

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ school marked our turning point. Through it we learned a lot about how to operate synchronous online learning. But more importantly, we saw that it actually worked! First grade students learned how to read and write and high-school students took their exams (SATs) and got very high scores.  

The potential of teaching languages online was definitely there. We saw how convenient and how effective it was. We saw how a teacher in one country can teach his or her language to a student in another country, and we saw the undeniable advantage of teaching a language directly from its native country.  

We knew then that we were on to something innovative and ground-breaking.  And that is how it all began.