16th March 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Something which is changing the world of private tuition is the ever increasing access and speed of the internet. In the last twenty years we’ve gone from only 10% of UK homes having internet access to 90%, and many of those homes in 1998 had only dial up internet, compared to the incredibly fast speeds provided today. All of this has meant that online tuition has become a viable option for many families in, or indeed outside of, the UK.
When Blue Tutors began, if we couldn’t find a tutor for someone because of where they lived, when we offered the option of remote tuition the response was generally negative. Students felt that it was a very poor substitute for face-to-face tuition, and actually corresponding over email or talking on the phone was preferred to anything online. Even when Skype began, the audio often cut out or sounded strange, and video was awful unless you had, what was considered to be, an amazingly fast connection.
The problem for tutoring is that communication plays such an important part of the learning process. A tutor is constantly looking and listening for clues to explain how well a student understands a concept, and a student wants a lesson where their tutor is as articulate and clear as possible. Poor audio and video means a lesson can take be 2-3 times as slow in the best case, and can actually lead to the student understanding something incorrectly in the worst case.
Today, even with an average connection, audio and video is almost a substitute for actually being in the same room. This means that more and more students are even saying that they would prefer an online tutor, rather than someone who travels to them. There are still some aspects of face-to-face lessons which are difficult to replicate; writing lines of algebra, for example, is something which everyone prefers to do with a pen and paper, no matter how good the programs for doing that electronically have become. However, anything discursive - and discussion is at the heart of good tuition - can be tutored so well over the internet, and the amount of online tuition is only going to increase.