videos: how does online tutoring work?
If much distance separates tutor and student, “same-room” tutoring is not practical. The broad adoption of key technologies has recently provided a very attractive alternative: tutoring online. This evolution parallels developments in the workplace and elsewhere. For example, there is a good chance you, or someone you know, uses video conferencing at work.
Tutoring online has some very attractive advantages over conventional tutoring, to the point that – here is a surprise – we sometimes online tutor students who are situated in our same town:
- less overhead – travel time, securing meeting space
- off-hour ease (e.g, early morning before school – see here)
- sessions can be recorded – like a video – and reviewed by the student – marvelous for those times a student later realizes she isn’t quite sure of certain points (and we tutors benefit from being able to review our work for quality)
- similarly, the student and tutor can take snapshots of key pages, diagrams, equations, and so on
- the tutor has readily available the entire internet and the tutor’s own stores of lesson material, allowing flexibility and depth and the ability to instantly provide information to the student who can then bookmark it on her own computer and/or save it in the student’s private work area
- most students are completely comfortable interacting and working online. That’s good – ask the college kids you know how their first job interviews are conducted. Chances are many of them get interviewed online.
Our full-featured, premier online tutoring capability
Most online tutoring out there essentially consists of using a shared whiteboard. We have a whiteboard, but so much more. Our hybrid platform flexibly supports a broad range of tutoring modes that allow the student and the tutor to work very naturally. We have yet to see another online tutoring service that incorporates all the elements we have in place. We constantly review technical advancements to find ways to enhance our service.