6th January 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
A challenging task for us, is to decide on the amount of information that we ask for from our students before searching for their perfect tutor. From a tutor’s point of view the answer is simple – get as much information as possible that it’s easy to decide whether one can tutor the student, and whether one wants to. And, if only life were that simple, running a tuition agency would be very easy.
The difficulty arises because students come to us in many different situations. Some students have an exam in only a few days, and don’t want to spend anything longer than 5 minutes giving us their details, and then they quickly want to know if there are any tutors near them who could possibly tutor within the next few days. The other extreme is a student who intends to have a number of lessons over a long period of time, and is happy to spend as long as it takes to give us the maximum information possible, so that the tutor we find is perfectly suited to the student.
It will obviously occur to the reader that this last situation is the best option for both tutor and student, and that any student would be best advised to give us lots of information. However, we’re aware that we’re part of a competitive industry, and as long as there are other tuition agencies out there who ask for the bare minimum of information, we’re competing with organisation which appear much easier to deal with initially.
What we hope to do in the future is create a system that does what both people want it to do: allow new students to quickly and easily send us the minimum information that we require to find them a tutor, but also give other students the opportunity to tell us all about their studies, and the type of help that they feel they need. Hopefully there will also be a facility so that students can immediately see a tutor’s contact details online, rather than asking us to search for them, but this is quite a change to our current system, and will require a fair amount more work.
The end goal is to provide what both our tutors and students want most, which generally means teasing as much information from the students as possible, so we can find the perfect tutor who wants to tutor them.