Required Equipment for Teaching Online

As is true of so many things in life, for teaching online lessons there are "must-haves" and "nice-to-haves." We'll go over the must-haves first.

Lessonface has Zoom video conferencing built in, which is very intuitive and works well with most computers, tablets, and phones. Generally, we recommend against using phones for lessons, as there's just not a lot of screen to be able to see what the student is doing. But, we have seen them work in a pinch.

There are only three components absolutely required for teaching live online lessons:

  • Computer or tablet

  • Webcam

  • Good Internet connection

This clip from a lesson dramatization with viola teacher Dina Maccabee illustrates the minimalist approach, in terms of set up and equipment: just a computer and a handy clip-on tuner. Keeping it simple seems to work great for lessons. 

Popular Lessonface guitar teacher Leah Kruszewski recently noted on our teacher-only forums (copied here with permission), "I currently use a Macbook Pro for all my classes, and a 2nd screen for viewing and sharing sheet music and other notes.  I have a nice webcam (Logitech) and mic (Apogee MiC), and used them for classes when I first got this computer. However, because some of the sound/picture quality inherently lost over the internet, students just didn’t notice or care about the differences between the nicer accessories and the built-in ones.  So I don’t use those the webcam and apogee for classes anymore (though they’re great for making recordings, and much better than the built in ones!)"

More about optional equipment for teaching music online here - including multi-cam set-ups and USB mics.

Connection: If you experience significant latency or poor-quality videochat with a wireless network, give a hardwired connection a try and see if things improve. Other steps that may help a bad connection are shutting down other programs on your computer, and doing a fresh restart of your system.

As for connection speed, we're aiming for at least 1 MBPS bandwidth, for both your upload speed and your download speed. You can test your real, actual connection by going to Speedtest.net and clicking on "GO." The numbers you get will be ping, upload speed, and download speed.

Ping indicates the amount of latency you should expect (in miliseconds). Upload and download speeds are how quickly things will upload or download, and is where the 1 mbps minimum is relevant. Most internet speeds well exceed this minimum, as of 2020, though it was not true when Lessonface first launched in 2013.
speedtest go graphic

You may need to wait for the page to load in order to see the GO.

Decent internet speed
Here we have what would be described as 39 megs down and 11 up. Anything over 1 MBPS works for online lessons.

This may not always correlate with the speed your internet provider claims. 

TLDR: Most standard internet connections work fine for online lessons these days, and most people will have adequate equipment on hand to get started. We'd encourage you to get started on the equipment you already have, before investing in more.

Here's how you can quickly jump into a test room at Lessonface (totally free).

If you're still wondering what you might do with a second camera, or a better headset, take a look at our optional equipment guide. If not, go to Setting the Scene, which has low-tech, practical advice on how to make your space work well for online lessons.

Check out other topics from the Teaching Online 101 in-depth guide.

Interested in getting started?

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