Teach operating systems online in English

Operating systems is the subject where much of what programmers take for granted finally gets explained: how a running program comes to believe it has the machine to itself, what happens between a call to read() and the bytes arriving from a disk, and why two threads that each add one to a shared counter a million times rarely reach two million. A student can follow a lecture on virtual memory perfectly well and still freeze when asked to translate an address by hand.

That is where a tutor earns their place. Concurrency bugs are hard to see and harder to reproduce, and textbook diagrams never quite match the code on the student's screen. Someone who runs the broken program, shows the interleaving that breaks it and fixes it in front of the student saves them hours of staring. The practical side works the same way: a patient guide gets someone at home in a Linux terminal far faster than a list of commands.

Why we are looking for operating systems tutors who teach in English

Clasora shows students the tutors who teach in the language they use the site in. A student reading Clasora in English is shown tutors who teach in English, so if English is your teaching language, those are the students who find you.

In this subject the vocabulary carries a lot of weight. “Context switch”, “page fault”, “critical section” and “race condition” each have a precise meaning. Most of the documentation a student will ever read, from man pages to comments in kernel source, is in English too. A tutor who uses the same words as the lecture notes and the manual helps the student connect all three.

Clasora does not employ tutors, and this is an opening rather than a job. You work independently: you set your own prices and hours, and you teach as much or as little as you like, whether that means a few lessons around your work as an engineer or enough hours to take the place of a job.

What teaching operating systems online on Clasora looks like

This opening is fully remote. Every lesson happens online, and you teach from wherever you live.

Students book from your calendar. They only see the times you have marked as free, shown in their own time zone, and you decide how much notice you need and how far ahead people can book.

Lessons run in the browser, with nothing to install on either side, and screen sharing suits this subject well. You can share a terminal on a Linux virtual machine and run ps or strace while the student watches processes and system calls appear, step through a short C program in gdb, or draw a page table on a whiteboard app and translate an address together. When a student shares their own screen, you see their compiler error exactly as they do. The in-call chat is handy for pasting a command, and background blur keeps your room private.

Between lessons, each student has a conversation with you. They can send the source file that keeps segfaulting, the output of a failing test or a link to their repository, and you can reply with notes or a short exercise. Messages, files and shared links sit next to the sessions they belong to. Your own exercise sets can live in your personal file area, documents can come across from Google Drive, and if you plan your week in Google Calendar, it can sync with your Clasora calendar.

What students usually want help with

Processes and threads: what fork, exec and wait do, process states, and what threads in one process share.

CPU scheduling: first come first served, round robin, priority scheduling and shortest job first, with waiting and turnaround times worked out by hand.

Synchronisation: race conditions, critical sections, mutexes, semaphores and condition variables, and classic problems such as the dining philosophers.

Deadlock: the four conditions behind it, resource allocation graphs and the banker's algorithm.

Memory management: paging, page tables and the TLB, virtual memory, and page replacement with FIFO and LRU.

File systems: inodes, directories, hard and symbolic links, journaling, and what happens to a file when it is deleted.

System calls and the kernel: user mode and kernel mode, interrupts and traps, and how one line of code becomes work done by the kernel.

Programming assignments: a small shell in C, a thread pool, a memory allocator, or changes to a teaching kernel such as xv6.

Linux and the command line: pipes and redirection, file permissions, processes and signals, SSH and Bash scripts.

Preparing for a test or an exam: scheduling and page replacement exercises, done until they come out right every time.

Working developers who want to know what their code does underneath, and people moving into system administration or DevOps.

Who we are looking for

You understand operating systems well enough to explain what happens between a program and the hardware, and to spot where a student's picture of it goes wrong.

You have written and debugged concurrent code, and you are at ease in a Linux terminal and in C, the language most operating systems coursework uses.

You explain clearly in English and can turn an abstract idea into a diagram or a ten-line program that shows it happening.

You might lecture on the subject, hold a degree in computer science, be a strong student of it, or work with systems every day as a systems programmer, an embedded developer or a system administrator.

You have a computer with a camera, a microphone and a steady internet connection, and a Linux machine or virtual machine to demonstrate on.

You are 18 or older.

Teaching experience helps, but it is not required.

What you get

No commission. Clasora takes nothing from the price you set.

Free to join and to publish. There is no subscription and no listing fee.

Your own prices. You set a price for each session length, and you can offer a free first session.

Your own hours. You choose your weekly hours and your days off, the notice you need and how far ahead students can book.

A public listing page. Your listing is a page of its own that search engines can find, shown in each visitor's language, with your photo, an intro video, what you teach, the languages you speak and your prices.

Reviews on what matters. Students rate you on knowledge, clarity and engagement.

Checked qualifications. You can add your degrees and certificates to your profile, and a moderator checks them.

Lessons in the browser. Video with screen sharing, background blur and in-call chat, and nothing for you or your students to install.

How to start

Create an account with the button on this page.

Publish a listing for operating systems.

Open your calendar and mark the hours you are free.

It takes a few minutes. You accept the terms when you become a tutor, and a moderator checks your listing before it goes live.

Questions tutors ask

Do I need to have worked on a kernel?

No. You need a solid command of the topics you offer and the ability to explain them clearly. If you hold a degree or other qualifications, add them to your profile and a moderator will check them.

Can I teach only Linux and the command line?

Yes. Your listing says what you teach, so you can offer the whole subject, only the theory, or only the practical side.

How do I show a terminal in a lesson?

Share your screen. A common setup is a terminal open on a Linux virtual machine or a remote server, with commands run live. Students can send you their code and error output in your conversation.

Do my students need Linux on their own computer?

Not for the lesson, which runs in the browser. To practise, many use a Linux virtual machine, a small cloud server or WSL on Windows.

How do I get paid?

Card payments are not switched on yet. For now a booking is confirmed without a card, and you and the student settle payment directly between you. Clasora takes no commission on what you charge.