How to record lessons on Preply

Just about every English teacher who works on Preply has hit this wall. A student asks to go back over a section, you want to keep the lesson as a reference, or you simply want to rewatch where the correction got stuck. So you open the Preply room and realize there is no record button. None. Not for the teacher, not for the student.

This article explains why recording lessons on Preply is such an annoying problem, what options exist today, and where each one fails in practice.

Why Preply has no native recording for teachers

Preply is a marketplace for private lessons. Their classroom runs in the browser, integrated with the platform, and it was designed so that the student picks a teacher, books the lesson, and shows up for the session. Recording the lesson was never part of the product, from the teacher's point of view.

There are two main reasons behind that. The first is student privacy: since Preply mediates the relationship, they prefer to avoid content being captured and distributed with no clear rules. The second is strategic: a marketplace does not want to hand the teacher a trail of recordings they can take elsewhere. The student belongs to the platform, and a recording would tie the student to the teacher more than to Preply.

The practical result for you is the same either way: no button to record your Preply lesson inside the room itself. If you want to record lessons on Preply, you will have to improvise from the outside.

How most teachers try to record Preply lessons today

Since the product does not solve it, teachers turn to external software. The four most common paths are below, and none of them is comfortable.

Native screen recording on Mac or Windows

On a Mac you can use Shift Command 5 and record the full screen or part of it. On Windows there is the Xbox Game Bar (Windows G) or built-in capture tools. It works, in the literal sense of producing a video file. But there are three practical problems.

First, the audio. By default, the system screen recorder captures only the teacher's microphone, not the student's voice coming out of the speakers. To capture the student's voice too you need to install a virtual audio driver (BlackHole on Mac, VB-Cable on Windows) and configure it to mix input and output. It is fiddly and breaks easily.

Second, the file. One hour of lesson recorded in full screen can run past 1 GB. You pile that up lesson after lesson and the disk fills up.

Third, you have to remember to hit record at the start of every lesson and stop at the end. Forget once and the lesson is gone.

OBS Studio

OBS is the choice for the more technical teachers. It is free, it captures the screen, it captures multiple audio sources, you can record at adjustable quality, and it exports a clean MP4.

The cost is the learning curve. You have to set up a scene, screen source, system audio source, microphone source, bitrate, codec. For anyone who is not technical, OBS is a chore to keep running properly. And you are still stuck remembering to hit record and stop.

Loom or a screen recording app

Loom is friendlier, recording your screen and camera with one click. It solves the "remember to record" issue because you just click once before the lesson begins. But the free plan caps minutes per video, and the recording lives in your Loom account, not on your system. You still have to hand it over to the student afterward (a link, downloading it and sending it over WhatsApp, uploading it to Drive).

And the student's voice problem is still there: by default Loom does not capture the call audio, only your microphone, unless you set up the system audio explicitly.

Recording with your phone propped on the desk

An analog solution that still shows up. You prop the phone to the side, open the voice recorder, and pick up the conversation. It captures only the audio, loses the screen, loses the slides the student wrote on, loses the whiteboard. As review material for the student it is almost useless. As a note for you to review later, it can work, but it is uncomfortable.

What all these paths are missing

Even when one of these options works, there is leftover work nobody wants to do.

You record the video, export it, upload it to a Drive or WeTransfer, copy the link, send it over WhatsApp to the student, and wait for them to download it. The student downloads the file, watches it once if they watch at all, and never goes back. There is no way to search for a section, no way to jump to the moment the new word came up, no transcription. It becomes a backup, not study material.

And it is worth checking Preply's terms before recording lessons through their room. The policy may require advance notice to the student, or place restrictions on how the recording can be used. Since you are recording from the outside, the responsibility is yours. It is not Preply notifying the student on your behalf.

In the end, recording a lesson on Preply is an improvised arrangement. It works for an emergency, it does not work as a working routine.

When it is worth dropping the workaround

If recording is a one-off thing for you (one lesson a month, only for emergencies), sticking with system screen recording is reasonable. You put up with the friction because the frequency is low.

But if you are teaching online every week and want to hand the recording to the student as part of the experience, the workaround path gets expensive in time. Every lesson turns into half an hour of logistics afterward: exporting, uploading, sending, keeping track of where you stored it.

In that scenario, it is worth considering moving your lesson to a place where the recording happens on its own.

How Noladi solves it

Noladi is a platform where the language teacher gives lessons on their own domain, under their own brand, and the lesson is recorded automatically without you having to remember anything.

You create the room inside Noladi, send the link to the student, teach on the collaborative whiteboard, and when the lesson ends the recording is already on its way. The teacher's audio and the student's audio are captured separately, the shared screen comes along, and a few minutes later the student sees the "lesson review" in their dashboard, inside the URL with your brand. The review includes the lesson video with a navigation timeline and a full transcription split by who spoke in each section, plus suggested points to review before the next lesson.

The practical difference is that you do not need to hit record, you do not need to export, you do not need to upload to a Drive, you do not need to send a link over WhatsApp. The lesson becomes organized study material for the student with no extra work on your side.

If you are teaching on Preply today and want to try this flow, you can run both in parallel: keep serving your existing students on Preply while you build your own lesson operation on Noladi for the new ones. Noladi gives you one hour of live class free to test the full flow, no card required. Check it out at /teacher.