24th February 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
At Blue Tutors we’re currently developing online tuition software. Nowadays this isn’t a revolutionary idea; many companies, such as tutor vista and tutor.com, already use quite sophisticated programs to tutor students from all over the world.
We were actually recently contacted by a small company offering online tuition, who wanted us to help them move into the UK market. The interesting thing from our point of view was the way the company were marketing themselves on their website. The obvious benefits of online tuition were made clear: no travelling costs, convenience, lessons at a time that suits tutor and student etc. However, although we believe in the value of online tuition at Blue Tutors, this website suggested that administration benefits meant that online tuition was objectively a better form than face-to-face tuition.
Now, the world is changing quickly, and you would have to be foolish to not embrace technology, and all the benefits that it can bring, but it is important to not forget the things that make tuition in person so special for so many people.
Whenever we ask people what they think makes a good teacher, invariably the answer will include some very human qualities: a good sense of humour, a good listener, friendly, relaxed. These qualities become blurred with online tuition. Why? Very simply because the communication is never as good when speaking through a computer. In person we react to small changes by whomever we’re speaking to. A tilt of the head, a twitch, pupil dilation, all these things contribute to our judgement of how another person is feeling or what they’re thinking, even if we don’t know we’re doing it, and much of this body language is lost when communicating online.
Having said all this, Blue Tutors are pushing ahead with online tuition, and we hope that our teaching guidelines will enable our tutors to give the most effective tuition over the web that there has ever been. We just want students to remember that there is no complete substitute for good, old fashioned, one-to-one tuition.