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The Impact and Effectiveness of Free Online Tutoring: A Comprehensive Study
In a recent Harris poll, students were asked what might help them do better in school. The most frequently occurring response was “a little extra help,” chosen by 35% of respondents. It is widely accepted that learners benefit from some individual attention, but the one-to-one ratio of human tutor to student has always made individual attention prohibitively expensive. In the current age of instant connectivity, the internet has become a place where the student can connect virtually with an expert human tutor simply, painlessly, and free of charge. However, is this easy and free availability of skilled tutors effective and helpful? This question is the primary motivation for this research study.
Reliable and organized analysis of online tutoring programs and their impact is difficult to achieve due in part to the rapidly changing environment of not only the technology and resources of online tutoring, but also changing pupil curricula, standards, and demographics. An authority on the subject by way of experience and accomplishment, Dr. Leslye Arsht, defined requirements for credible research of this nature and agreed that this project met those requirements. Among the essential testing specifications she identified were standardized testing scores, annual proficiency testing, qualitative feedback from children, parents, and teachers, pre- and post-individual tutoring sessions testing, teacher observation, and immediate and ongoing support.
The demand for free online tutorial services and the variety of services available continues to grow. Such services are often referred to as open source, peer-to-peer, or tutoring using open educational resources (OER). Some online tutoring services are guaranteed by professional companies and educational institutions that invest heavily in technology and support systems. Tutoring services either follow an integrated approach or a discrete one. The integrated tutoring approach is managed and supported by co-teachers who utilize both offline and online resources. This free online tutoring study adopted the discrete approach and was carried out under the umbrella of creating, enhancing, and enabling frequently visited educational resources (CHEAfVIER) consortium.
Flexible and easy computer-to-computer network access to teaching and learning services has been possible since the first Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) emerged in the early 1980s. Since then, there has been a steady growth in computer-based education systems. The busyness of life and increasing demand for lifelong learning have caused the time and location limitations on students to grow in importance when satisfying their needs for the educational content available in various electronic formats. Not only do students want online education, instructors and subject matter experts demand an environment that makes it easy for them to construct custom learning experiences. Open educational resources (OER) represent an opportunity to provide education to the world by making high-quality educational resources freely available on the Web, allowing for free and widespread distribution, and permitting the reuse, revision, remixing, and redistribution of such resources for educational purposes. Freely available content in the form of tutorials or reusable learning objects (RLOs), being important components of OER, becomes the content of the emerging free online tutoring services.
3.1. What strategies are most effective in free tutoring? How can tutoring be designed to engender the greatest learning benefits for the largest possible number and a diverse set of students? Based on student interviews, past research, and the results from the field experiment, many lessons can be learned.
3.2. Recruit the “Best” Tutors Free tutoring programs should attract the best possible tutors with strong economics backgrounds, good communication skills, and a passion for education. This may involve financial incentives such as scholarships, compensation, volunteer recognition, or other non-monetary benefits. Although our RCT in Section 3 and past research from other fields suggest that high-ability tutors do not necessarily produce the best learning outcomes, conducting rigorous evaluations may complement the recruitment process and ultimately yield benefits for students. Program administrators can identify low-performing students based on free tutoring program evaluations and allocate the highest-quality tutors to them.
3.3. Develop a Well-Structured Curriculum Training for free tutors should include modules on effective tutoring techniques, communication skills, developing curriculum, and establishing achievable learning goals, in addition to providing refresher training on a continuous basis. These modules can be conducted in four to six one-hour after-school or weekend sessions, using both online reading material and in-person role-playing activities. As part of this continuous training, seasoned tutors can also be encouraged to share their experiences with novice tutors.
3.4. Assess Students’ Prior Knowledge Assessment has in the past been shown to increase learning outcomes. However, this was not true in our RCT when evaluative feedback was provided, as we discuss in detail in Section 3. We also received complaints that the assessment modules were perceived as unnecessary. From student interviews, we learned that some students considered this pre-reading requirement to be a deterrent in enrolling in the program.
In this section, we describe five case studies of four different organizations that have developed a free, open source online tutoring platform. These case studies provide insight into both the tool and the implementation. We divide our case studies between public (where benefit costs are large) and charter schools (where in particular graduation rate increases are more valuable). In all of the case studies, the tool occupies a very essential part of the tutoring model given the relative monetary cost advantages of the platforms.
A team of students from the University of California, Berkeley created a free online tutoring platform to enable team-based learning in large lecture courses. The platform allows instructors to preload problems and then display them to large groups of students who are sitting in the lecture hall. Students work in teams to solve the problem and enter the answer into the system, which allows the instructor to quickly see how many teams have entered a correct response. The instructor can then display the responses for everyone to see, and the system tracks which teams were correct. The team designed the platform with a strong feature set in order to have access to descriptive data on how collaborative homework is completed and whether students learn from these activities. After Berkeley, the course was also offered at Irvine and San Diego, and is currently being offered at a number of additional UC campuses. The classroom tools were the only offering from the course for the legacy courses and were viewed as a clear positive for student learning and curriculum innovation. Going forward, most of the course team believes that OpenEd will use the platform as part of their tutoring solution.
Through this comprehensive study, we have reviewed the relevant evidence from informal and formal face-to-face tutoring and hypothesized why formal tutoring should be effective. We also sought to clarify the potential opportunities and concerns concerning free online tutoring initiatives. Our aims in conducting the study were to compare the reported effectiveness of the various free online tutoring initiatives with the potential effectiveness we predicted, hypothesized, and derived, pre-experiment. Additionally, we wanted to learn ways in which those that operate and oversee these tutoring initiatives might improve them. Interesting outstanding free online tutoring initiatives (that are affordable, scalable, and convenient) have the greatest potential to significantly alleviate society’s varied educational ills.
We emphasize “interesting” outstanding free online tutoring initiatives as these are necessary conditions; they aren’t sufficient to lead to widespread tutoring program usage or effectiveness. It remains to be seen if cheaper, higher-quality, and more scalable initiatives will encourage broader usage and better instruction; such initiatives will not only pay off in the short-term but will also be cost-effective in the long-term; use of such platforms will have NEC within formal education -or- these platforms will be replaced by formal educational supports. We also expect that individuals will move even more of their interactions (for better or worse) to the internet over the years to come. Grasping free online tutoring’s potential and limitations leads to a more complex study, more ambitious improvement initiatives, and raises even more critical ethical questions. Our goal will be to cover as much relevant territory as deeply as possible. With the added complexity and richness, it becomes necessary to prioritize and sometimes to limit aspects that we do cover.
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