Online Tutoring is More Effective than In-Person Sessions

Online tutoring with a proper setup is more effective than in-person tutoring. A decade ago, my online setup consisted of an iPhone camera pointed down onto a sheet of paper where I wrote answers to student questions by hand while they followed along on the other end of a FaceTime call. This rudimentary approach has evolved. Now, my setup is centered around the complimentary use of an iPad Pro and a laptop over a Zoom call. It’s easiest to see the benefits when comparing it to in-person tutoring.

When more of my sessions were in-person, my time before and after sessions was spent looking for parking or on a subway without service. I would then often arrive to a student who still had to find their workbook, get a pencil, or log on to their student portal. Before online sessions, however, I’m able to communicate with students to remind them to be prepared for tutoring so we don’t waste time. By the time we start, they’ve already shared the worksheets and Google Docs so I am ready to help right away. As soon as we finish Zoom sessions, I send screenshots of our tutoring notes to students and parents to review. When needed, I can also send recorded portions of our session to students to continue studying afterwards. For math, they’ll usually redo an earlier question from our session and then watch the recorded step-by-step explanation to confirm their work. It’s a personalized tutorial video. Post-session conversations with parents were also awkward in-person as we discussed their child’s performance while their child was still within earshot—sometimes needlessly leading to an emotionally loaded air right before I leave. After an online session, however, I can correspond with parents privately including the session notes so that parents can best support their child’s learning between sessions. That way I can actually do justice to explaining the student’s progress with a comprehensive message and notes, as opposed to a rushed debriefing as I put my shoes back on and fend off the dog’s playful “goodbyes.”

Unlike the literally impossible job of a teacher—to be a subject matter expert, differentiate their teaching across several grade levels of student ability within the same class, manage classroom dynamics, faculty politics, and deliver content in an engaging way—the role of a tutor is much sharper: effectively improve student performance and understanding. It’s easy to find tutors that are proficient in trigonometry or chem. Plenty of high school children prove their literacy in these subjects on standardized tests. The challenge is finding a proficient tutor that can also communicate the material to students in an engaging way that matches their learning style. This has to be done dynamically with visually stimulating, personalized content.

Visually interesting, color-coded digital notes and explanations work better than pencil on paper. Sets of like terms in a polynomial can all be highlighted the same color. Intermediate steps that are scheduled to be phased out can be written in yellow. Related math moves are organized by color as are concepts in every subject when tutoring online. It would be impractical, and hilarious from a teenage student’s perspective, to show up to in-person sessions with a pouch filled with every color writing utensil to repeatedly switch between. On a proper Zoom set up, however, the next writing tool, color, width and opacity is just an unseen finger tap away in the hands of an experienced online tutor. The best I could do in-person was switch between a couple pens after my students printed their worksheet or found a blank sheet of printer paper. Now imagine we could annotate with seamless color application and tools directly in the textbook, a video posted by the teacher, worksheets, novels, test prep books, lab reports, DeltaMath, the graphing calculator, on anything that can be seen on screen. This ability to visually manipulate and present ideas is the core advantage of online tutoring sessions and the main reason it’s more effective.

Consider the art of helping a student organize and then edit an essay. In-person, the tutor is sitting side-by-side where you cannot see the student’s face, you struggle to share a keyboard, and interrupt their thought process every time you need to make a comment on their grammar or logic. Instead of breathing over your student’s shoulder, we can each be in our own comfortable spaces conducive to writing with our own keyboards on a shared Google Doc. I can read my students’ faces for cues about what I should explain further because I can actually see their face. I can edit one portion in suggestion mode so my students never miss a punctuation edit and can study it afterwards, while they use the digital copy of their text I shared beforehand for keywords to make it easier to find supporting quotes. The whole process is smooth. Every edit is recorded, every document version history is available, and the colorful, hand-drawn outline we made is shared simultaneously guiding our work.

Another compounding benefit of online sessions is the availability of micro sessions. Parents would never try to schedule a 15-minute-long in-person tutoring session the moment their child lost momentum and is struggling to start an assignment or study for tomorrow’s quiz. And I wouldn’t have been able to drive through Central Park for a 15-minute-long session on short notice either. This powerful Zoom tutoring setup makes short impromptu tutoring possible. In between my prescheduled sessions, I can hop on a mini session with a student to offer some guidance on how to start the Sources of Error section of a lab report, or relieve their short story blank page syndrome. The frustration of not knowing how to solve a math problem on the practice test and not being able to find answers on your own ruins a students momentum, and can waste valuable time and motivation. My students regularly send a text with a DeltaMath screenshot of a practice problem they can’t figure out. They get a recorded step-by-step explanation in return with a custom follow-up question and the expectation that they send an answer back. Mini sessions offer students the relief they need when it’s needed, and parents have a peaceful weekday evening with their teenager. It’s a public service really.

By now, you should be fully convinced that online tutoring sessions are more effective at improving student scores and understanding. If you’re still having a doubt, or are hanging on to the notion that you get more for your money when the tutor arrives at your kitchen table, consider this: what are the chances that the tutor best suited to address your child’s needs in a specific subject is local? What would happen if you widen the field to include the talent of full-time, professional tutors around the nation?

We are living in a very exciting time. The intersection between technology and education is where exponential learning potential is being unlocked. The same way technology has made unforeseen efficacy possible in other industries in our lifetime, it is revolutionizing schooling and test prep for open-minded, early adopters. Refined student performance tracking and analytics, as well as legitimately gamified student collaboration and personalized independent learning are among these advances. So next time you’re inclined to ask a tutor if they can do in-person sessions, try a few online ones first to see how well it works.