I’m afraid of bringing virtual tutoring into my home. Why should I think beyond the traditional formats for my child? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Brian Galvin, Chief Academic Officer for Varsity Tutors, on Quora:
That’s a great question and one that learners and teachers alike have been asking for a while. Back when I started teaching and tutoring online, I began skeptically. And then when I started training in-person tutors to teach online, most of them were skeptical to start too. But as educators, we quickly turned the corner: at least for the majority of learners who chose to work with online tutoring, the format was a perfect fit. Scheduling was so much more convenient. Online tools helped pack lessons with even more value. And learning follow-up was easier, too.
I think initially, the idea of online education was that it was essentially “close enough to traditional education that it was a suitable replacement if you couldn’t make traditional meeting work.” But for those of us who got immersed in it, it was quickly apparent that online learning had its own unique benefits. It was its own tool–much like a screwdriver and screw aren’t just “okay if you don’t have a hammer and nail,” online learning has lots of circumstances where it’s the perfect or preferred tool for the job. Here are some reasons why:
Convenience
I almost hesitate to lead with “convenience” because education should transcend ordinary convenience–it’s such a critical part of our children’s lives that we should move mountains to give them every advantage. Right?
But one of my favorite pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten was related to another type of self-improvement, exercise: “The best workout is the one you actually do.” You can have grand intentions of getting the perfect equipment and getting on a perfect schedule…and then waiting for all those perfect things to fall in place and either never getting started or never getting in a rhythm.
And that’s incredibly true of tutoring: families’ lives are busy, and driving across town or keeping the kitchen table clear and quiet to conduct tutoring sessions can very easily mean they don’t happen, or they happen less frequently or regularly than intended, or they get shortened because of distractions or traffic or any number of interferences.
Online tutoring takes the majority of those hassles out of the equation–for everyone involved including student, parent, and tutor. Sessions are easy to schedule and reschedule. No one has to worry about traffic or parking or whether the library will have an open table. Research (check out the National Student Success Accelerator at Brown University) shows that tutoring is most impactful when it’s “high dosage” – it happens regularly with the same tutor over a period of time. Convenience can sound a little trite or indulgent, but it ensures that sessions happen regularly, with the same tutor, over an extended period of time.
And convenience also opens up…
Access
Online tutoring makes it possible for students wherever they may be to have access to experienced, expert tutors that are a perfect fit for them. And I want to break that down because it’s one of those internet platitudes–”technology affords greater access”–but it’s so much more than that for tutoring.
A good tutoring session is probably on average an hour long (and that’s even on the long side for elementary students’ attention spans). So when you factor in the logistics of “place” – commute, parking, budgeting time for delays–that significantly limits access to great tutors, for a few reasons:
- It just doesn’t make logistical sense for a tutor to work with students who are much more than 20 minutes away (so the total number of tutors available is limited)
- It’s difficult for a tutor to work with more than a few students per day in the peak after-school study hours (so the pool of tutors becomes even more limited)
- The elements of tutoring that tutors love about it–working with students, seeing progress, and of course getting paid–get watered down by the logistics (as does the effective pay rate when each hour worked is accompanied by 30 minutes or more of place-based logistics). That limits the tutor pool as people seek out other opportunities or limit tutoring to certain times.
But with online tutoring taking place out of the equation, more tutors can work with more students and spend more of their time actually teaching and helping. I’ll use myself as an example:
I had a long run as a highly-rated, highly-referred, and pretty effective tutor. And I loved it–there are few experiences like being able to work with a student, diagnose where they’re not clicking, build that understanding, and watch them run with it. But my local area was Los Angeles, home of traffic and parking woes, and I remember having to have that “are the logistics worth it?” conversation with myself and realizing I loved everything about the time I spent tutoring, but I missed the time I didn’t have as a result. To tutor for an hour after work and know I could get there on time, I had to schedule sessions for 7pm or later…that one session was probably my whole night. On weekends, even though I was up and ready to go, it wasn’t good education to have a student meet at 8am on a Saturday, so I’d schedule for mid or late morning and a meeting or two could be the biggest chunk of my day.
Until teaching online became an option. Now I could use my west coast hours to my advantage and meet with multiple students between 7 and 10am–and if they were on the east coast, they still got the mid-morning time that was ideal for them. I could schedule after work meetings for immediately after work. And since my pool of students was the whole country, I could specialize in the types of situations I knew I was best at helping with–I’d hear from the main office that a student had a particular profile and I’d know it was right up my alley and I already had a plan I was excited to work on with them.
So online tutoring provides “access” but in so many important ways:
- It means more tutors are available because the experience is so much better for them
- It means tutors have more longevity and work with more students, meaning you can work with higher-quality tutors
- The larger pool of better tutors means that you can find the perfect fit for your schedule, your learning needs, and your learning style.
- And I’d add this: since most tutors would agree that the value proposition is that much better online, online tutoring may have taken a healthy proportion of the top instructors in your local area out of the local pool, too.
So online tutoring has dramatically increased access to top tutors, but I’d also say it’s made top tutors that much more effective, too. Which leads me to…
Effectiveness & Agility
To be a great tutor 20 years ago likely meant that you carried around an oversized backpack full of various textbooks and workbooks for your subject, hand-made activity packets for different learning needs, and an array of post-its, notecards, highlighters, and pens. Today, everything you need is available in just a few clicks. Technology hasn’t just made tutoring sessions more convenient to schedule and attend, but more convenient to conduct effectively, too.
Consider this: in any good tutoring session there are a handful of elements in play. The tutor wants to diagnose what’s happening with a student, so they look over recent assignments and/or have the student talk through a few examples. The tutor wants to demonstrate or reinforce a key concept, so they work through a few basic examples slowly. The tutor wants to see how the student handles the new concept, so they watch a student work through a few basic examples. And they want to make sure the student gets that concept holistically, so they then vary up the examples in terms of difficulty or “angle” (what’s given, what’s missing, etc. – is the student proficient in the skill or just getting really good at blindly repeating that one process?)
Which seems basic enough, but when you’re at an in-person meeting your access to the student’s recent work and to a variety of examples on that topic is limited to what’s in that space with you. And if someone forgot a workbook or the book has fewer examples than expected, the effectiveness of that session is quickly compromised. I vividly remember tutoring sessions where I’d diagnose that a student had a particular issue (say, combining and then reducing ratios), we’d start to work on the fundamentals and they’d be getting it, and then I’d want to work through several examples together and…there just weren’t any more in the book. So I’d handwrite new questions, trying to do the scratchwork in my head to make sure the numbers worked out nicely so that the problem didn’t get overly complicated and destroy the “see? You can do this!” takeaway I was shooting for. And all that time the student was just waiting.
Online tools are transformative – in just a few clicks, tutors can find examples with really specific parameters. One of my favorite tools of ours at Varsity Tutors enables students and tutors to hold an assignment or book up to their webcam and immediately that page is on the screen to start working on (right-side up for both parties, too – never underestimate the amount of reading that in-person tutors have had to do upside-down when sitting across a table!).
I mention “agility” in this subheading and to me that’s a crucial thing that technology enables. Because so often in a tutoring session, you’ll identify that the misconception or missing concept for a student isn’t the name of that chapter, unit, or skill they’re working on–it’s something from a previous grade or subject that never clicked. And so to succeed on today’s assignment, the key is to drill into that missing concept. Working online means that practice content for “every” subject is available at the click of a button; you’re not at all limited to the physical resources in the room with you. Or you may find that a student really needs real-world examples to make an abstract concept click; Google keeps you off the hot seat for having to dream up those examples on the spot.
Simply put, online tutoring makes available a giant array of practice content and examples within a seconds, allowing sessions to move at the student’s pace without lags or tangents that can interrupt positive learning.
Permanence
Educators love seeing those “a-ha” moments when working with students…but what’s exponentially more important is that students “got it” but that they retained it. And we all have that: the thought that’s so clear in our head one moment and then a fleeting former memory a few days later.
Any good tutor is primed to push for takeaways and summaries, made as simple as possible. A session can cover a wide variety of examples, questions, facts, and reminders; what you want is the student to walk away with a handful of repeatable concepts and strategies they’ll continue to practice and reinforce.
Even basic online tools make this dramatically easier and more common for tutors to push. During a session you can summarize key takeaways in an email as they’re ongoing, then clean it up immediately post-session and send: “here’s what I want you to focus on, here’s the short homework I’m hoping you’ll use to practice that.” There’s a clear, succinct, set of takeaways that don’t rely on a student’s memory or note taking–and the parent is looped in, too.
But online tutoring tools go well beyond that nowadays. Sessions can be recorded and bookmarked so that students can use the recording as a study aid before a test or when stuck on a problem. And parents can review sessions to reinforce key takeaways and get a taste of what’s really happening in those sessions, too. Tutors can send targeted reinforcement for homework, and since that homework is done online in a student’s account they can see progress and use results to prepare for the next session.
Security
Going back to the overall question here–I have a tendency to get excited about the educational potential of online tutoring and get carried away–I’d suspect the word “afraid” may relate to security, the concern about having students meet with someone you don’t know, in a city you’ve never been to, etc. And as a fellow parent I completely understand: the internet can be a very strange place; even as a happy online educator I don’t think I’d want the young people in my life choosing a Skype tutor off of Craigslist without a lot of due diligence.
But if you’re availing tutoring through a mainstream, reputable provider, there are some security advantages:
- Many providers conduct professional background checks on all tutors
- Many providers record all sessions, so there’s full transparency of everything that takes place
- Larger providers make it easy to change tutors, no questions asked, so if there’s even a hint of “I don’t feel great about this pairing” you can switch conveniently without having to speak to the tutor
- With online lessons, sessions can take place from your home without having to invite a stranger over at all
And note my use of “many providers” above – it pays to do your homework to ensure that the service you’re considering offers the security you’re looking for. But many reputable providers take that kind of security extremely seriously and professionally, and can detail the many steps they take to accomplish those standards. And online tutoring also means that you don’t have to drop your student off outside the home or invite anyone new over.
Summary
There will always be a lot to love about in-person, 1:1 instruction. But that format also carries a lot of limitations that online instruction has solved and turned into strengths. Online learning makes scheduling and holding meetings convenient, ensuring that meetings happen consistently. It provides access to a wider pool of more-experienced tutors. It gives tutors and students the tools to maximize the value of each session, and to make lessons memorable and permanent. And it provides security features to make searching for an expert to help your student an easier experience.
This question originally appeared on Quora – the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
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