online tutors uk

online tutors uk

The Evolution and Impact of Online Tutoring in the United Kingdom

1. Introduction to Online Tutoring

While online tutoring is clearly evolving, there is evidence to suggest that its emergence is part of the changing fabric of private supplementary education (in particular the rise of mainstream tuition), driven by changes in material infrastructures for education, austerity measures, and attempts to plug the gaps in provision created by recent marketisation policy changes in education. Furthermore, different forms of online tutoring are practised – from asynchronous forms through to platforms such as Tutorfair, MyTutor and Tute, and apps like MyTutor that provide synchronous online tuition. All seem to have generated a degree of interest among schools, parents and young people. While some professionals and others involved in tuition have a clear preference for face-to-face teaching, and acknowledge that this still dominates tutor-pupil relations, it is clear that some areas should be explored further in terms of the potential for online tutoring to support teaching schools.

This paper presents the findings of a project on online tutoring in the UK. The project looked at how online tutoring is used in British schools, what we know about its impacts, what happens in online tuition sessions, how online tutoring is organised and what makes it effective, and what experts and practitioners think about it. Overall, this project found that online tutoring is moving increasingly into the mainstream in the UK, while remaining only part of the tutoring sector and far from being the dominant form of tuition.

2. Advantages and Benefits of Online Tutoring in the UK

The growth in online tutoring has been fueled by increasing internet access. Online tutoring allows students to learn from anywhere with an internet connection. It also has the ability to cater to a wider customer base. As well as private tutors advertising their services online, it’s now feasible for digital training organizations to offer their support services to people they would have previously had no option to teach. Online tutoring can have long-term benefits for a student. It’s an opportunity for a child to access a personalized learning experience without having to leave the home. Online tutoring has also been linked to improved academic performance and increased confidence. The overall academic gains have been mirrored in the responses of students and parents to our Annual Academic Survey. In 2016, 67% of those taking part said online tutoring had a positive impact on their final exam results. In total, 96% of respondents said they would recommend working with an online tutor to would-be participants.

Online tutoring is quickly becoming a popular way for pupils around the United Kingdom to get the academic support and guidance that they need to improve and develop new skills. This approach to tutoring is complementing conventional styles of tutoring, as many children opt for a combination of the two. No matter the form of tutoring, one of its distinct advantages is its ability to cater to the differing expectations of both pupils and parents.

3. Challenges and Limitations of Online Tutoring

Some reports also suggest that virtual learning environments can create a sense of disconnect as well as allowing paid-for individuals to attend the online session in the tutee’s place. In a traditional assessment scenario, tutors can keep their eyes on their candidates and help with pacing and clarification. However, as I noted earlier, many of these possible limitations should not be exaggerated, and there are specific benefits, drawbacks, and solutions. It is here that we, as a sector, need to decide how to maximize the potential of online tutoring to be accessible to as many students as possible while providing a high-quality service.

Online tutoring is not without its drawbacks or difficulties. The first issue that often comes to mind is technical. Every form of online connectivity brings barriers because technological glitches, devices, fast internet connections, and every environmental distraction can reduce the quality and thus limit access to online tutoring. In 2019, in the UK, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that an estimated 5.3% of households still did not have access to the internet. Additionally, 1.5% of households owned no internet-enabled devices. These are not large numbers, but they highlight that societal issues surrounding the older or more vulnerable who may lack access to the necessary tech tools and who may have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Further barriers arise in internet connectivity in the home, which may limit one to use Wi-Fi video-based technology or even extend to the most basic need to have access to enough power wires in the home. Online tutoring can also involve additional difficulty in monitoring and motivating the tutee, who may be used to face-to-face, tangible encouragement.

4. Best Practices and Strategies for Effective Online Tutoring

Strategies to Ensure Effective Communication with your Tutee(s) When communicating in an online lesson, realizing the limited ways non-verbal feelings and reactions can be communicated is crucial to creating effective dialogue and supporting students. Expanding comfort levels in communicating online to young people can bolster communication and mutual interaction. Developing an insightful learning environment can make everyone feel more accepted. Asking for the feelings, thoughts, and ideas of tutee(s) on their linguistic skills, academic circumstances, and the technical experience working in a program are additional approaches to understanding communication. A good approach to get the ball rolling is to ask students how they believe the process is going.

Creating an Engaging and Interactive Learning Environment The comfort and capability levels of both tutor and tutee in online environments can dramatically affect the quality of the learning, teaching, and interaction. As a first step towards ensuring digital comfort, we have found that tutees generally benefit from a “meeting” with their tutor beforehand or at the start of their first session. Then, the tutor physically (or digitally) shows them the materials available to them as a student. They can take note of any documents they may need either before the session or concurrently, and the tutor can also familiarize them with the program and its capabilities. While this can be accomplished through text, spoken word aids—like those offered in physical meetings—can be significantly more effective and comforting for some young people.

Introduction The previous sections of this paper largely summarize costs, benefits, risks, and advantages of online tutoring, as well as the thoughts and perceptions of those who have used it in some capacity. Within this final section, potential best practices and strategies to optimize the effectiveness of online tutoring sessions are discussed in greater depth. Much of this information has been distilled from our consultations and interviews with key stakeholders. As previously discussed, national guidelines do exist for private tuition services, but few are technology-specific or are designed to inform best practices for online tutoring.

Effective Online Tutoring: Best Practices and Strategies

5. Future Trends and Innovations in Online Tutoring

However, much progress is to be made. One of our platform experts, Kevin Gibbs of MyTutor, stated that when humans talk to a new machine today, they frequently persist in ‘teacher-speak’ to it, as a pre-frontal cortex, which digital buttons don’t have, is required to hold the uncertainty that sometimes comes with the messiness of human conversation. Furthermore, for this final industry trajectory, when millennials or those young enough to be the first wave of Generation Z tutors start to grow at the deep end of online tuition companies, there is another possible course ahead. Statistics in our surveys showed strong industry commitment to the university-age tutoring workforce, and those with experience working successfully with current (often higher-paying) leaders in industry sector subjects are more likely to be allowed to tutor while possessing a degree, in a slew of areas previously ignored.

The progression of online tutoring is speculative to some extent, but there are already hints on the ground of what the UK can expect from the internet and social changes in the years ahead. As educational technology zooms the internet forwards, services such as digital blackboards with voice annotation and automatic progress tracking, integrated into the platform, will be the norm rather than the exception. The blurring of lines between tutoring and internal peer group work, and the trend for more and more students to move en masse under the remote learning management of one professional tutor at a time, rather than engaging in one-by-one consultations more traditionally of tutoring, will also continue in response to growing student demand. A future that puts all this through the lens of cutting-edge artificial intelligence looks like a daunting space. Already, platforms and studies in this area are broaching coach bot territory, a world where human emotion and proactive sensors could mimic their conversation in therapy almost perfectly. Some predict bots will be delivering the spark of inspiration at the beginning of a lesson, while an innovative approach or beyond-the-book practice can save time on being resolute. Yet tutoring as one-to-one dialogue, in real time with human emotion thrown in, might be something that is seen as lasting hard for a machine to do well, particularly where those who excel at tutoring are so often themselves good at making emotional connections. Wherever artificial intelligence does go, our experts were in no doubt that sometimes a student’s needs and preferences, or just the tutor’s, would always cause one-to-one human real-time interaction to remain in demand.

5. Online Tutoring Today: What to Expect in the Future