The Art Of Online Tutoring

The Art of Online Tutoring The advent and rise of tutoring via online platforms has allowed the industry to spread far and wide, affording parents, students and tutors greater flexibility as well as cutting time and costs on travel. Many individual tutors and agencies have taken to providing services online in order to extend their potential client pool to any location on the planet (with a stable wi-fi connection), allowing the industry to modernise in line with other communication platforms such as social media, private messaging and business video conferencing. While there are certainly aspects of teaching that are missed via online tutoring platforms, as with video calls and all other forms of virtual, non-physical communication, these new possibilities have helped knowledge to be shared rapidly and globally and the future and potential growth of tutoring online is certainly looking bright. Here, I will discuss the skills required for online tutoring as well as looking at the technology that is driving this modernisation.

Put simply, tutoring online provides challenges that do not exist when tutoring in person. The proximity and ease of communication that comes with tutoring a student side-by-side is greatly reduced via the online service, an inevitable consequence of moving the session to a virtual platform. One of the great attractions of tutoring is that students receive one-to-one training and teaching that is not possible in a larger classroom environment and this often comes in the form of a tutor being able to sit next to a child while they go through an exercise, correcting them as they go and highlighting words, phrases, equations or else as and when it is needed.

Tutoring online thus requires a different approach. In order to replicate the close, intimate environment of face-to-face tutoring, tutors must be more patient with students, allow them more time to complete tasks and be more willing to go over material two, three, four times if necessary. In my experience, this can be a tricky practice to implement, and often requires more active perseverance than first meets the eye. To take the latter point as an example, explaining a concept when you are sitting next to a student is far easier, as you are able to fully engage the student, jot down the basics on a piece of paper or act it out via physical gestures. These three factors are largely removed over an online platform, and so children will take longer to comprehend an idea.

What s more, one result of tutoring young people online in this day and age is that they are highly likely to lose their concentration during a session. Perhaps because of their increased technological savviness, they are more tuned into the applications and functions of their computer or tablet but perhaps more importantly, they lose focus because of the perceived distance between tutor and tutee. The physical disconnect between the two parties can create an environment in which the student disengages more easily. I find there are three principal remedies for this:

1. Provide incentives: allow the student to work towards rewards, whereby they earn the chance, for example, to play more interactive games if they correctly complete a set number of answers within a set time-frame

2. Take more breaks: try to break up an hour-long session with two or three breaks to allow the child to switch off temporarily, before regaining sharper focus upon return this lack of focus is all the more acute online

3. Make it more FUN: when tutoring in person, it can be much easier to allow your natural social skills to make a session more interesting and exciting online, you must show this in different ways, either by speaking in a more interested and less prescri ptive manner or, for younger children, by introducing a character prop, like a toy monkey, who assists them in their learning

The primary aim is to maintain the child s interest and the newest online technology in the tutoring industry is building in reward bonuses to make this task easier for tutors. The most advanced development, however, is in the area of the virtual whiteboard which allows tutor and tutee to share a mutually visible screen via which the tutor can write out phrases, display exercises and note down or correct vocab. This new inclusion to the online tutoring platform goes a long way to imitating the side-by-side marking, correcting and sharing that makes tutoring in person so effective. I have found it to be a highly successful tool and one that all users of online tutoring should be looking to adopt. As well as the virtual whiteboard, efficient feedback systems are allowing a two-way quality assurance measure to thrive: firstly, to ensure that the student is working well and progressing as much as possible and secondly, that the tutor is assisting the student as much as they can. Mandatory post-session lesson summaries and comments, completed by both the tutor and tutee, maintain and incentivise a high-level of performance from both sides, assuring that the best tutors are rewarded and those that don t perform are not able to hide. This kind of quality control is a very positive addition to the tutoring industry and is one that has been accelerated by the rise of online tutoring.

While there still remains complications in the world of online tutoring, such as the perceived distance between tutor and tutee and the imbalance that stems from wealthier students being able to access laptops and wi-fi, the industry is still in its infancy and, in time, these complications will be ironed out to produce a highly efficient and productive model. Investment in the technology will continue to grow and with it will come improvements in communication and interaction. From the tutor s point of view, adjustments will be required and this, as ever, will take time. The most successful tutors will be able to identify the key differences, as outlined above, between online tutoring and the traditional face-to-face model and adapt to them quickly and effectively.