Improving Academic PerfORMANCE

We recently conducted an interview with Sam, who is one of the best online physics tutors on our team.  He's been providing online tutoring for several years in Math and Physics.

One of the results of being able to look for tutors online is that there tends to be a selection available, which means that you have to evaluate different tutors in order to be able to choose among them.  If you are looking for an online statistics tutor, here are a couple of factors to base your evaluation on.

Choose A Specialist

Statistics is a specialized subject that not all tutors, or even all math tutors, will be proficient in.  Generally, the more subjects a tutor claims to be able to teach, the less specialized he or she is.  A tutor who claims proficiency in statistics and twenty other subjects is probably not as proficient as a tutor who claims to be proficient in just one or only a few subjects.

Sam Ribnick is an online MyGuru tutor for calculus and physics. He attended MIT where he received a Bachelor of Science in Physics, and is a high school physics teacher in Boston Public Schools. He has tutored students online and in person on subjects including AP calculus, AP and IB physics, multi-variable calculus and introductory college physics.

As the web continues to become more and more of a fixture of everyday life, more and more students are looking for the convenience and accessibility of online tutoring.  A wide range of college tutors for all subjects can be found online, but finding them can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to start.  That’s what this post is for.  If you are looking for a college tutor online, here are five places you can start your search.

Join Discussion Boards 

There are discussion boards you can join that are related to tutoring in general as well as to specific subjects.  Some of these are just online, attached to websites, and others are groups on social networking sites like Facebook and Linkedin.  Similarly, discussions happen via mailing list groups as well.  These can be good places to ask for leads or advice or to actually meet tutors who hang out there.

On the surface, there are many reasons why students and parents consider private tutoring, but in essence they boil down to three fundamental reasons.  The general reasons for hiring a private tutor are listed here in order of reactiveness to proactiveness.

1.  When There’s A Problem

The majority of people looking for a tutor are hoping to solve a problem.  These are parents seeking out tutors because their kids’ report cards are unsatisfactory, or college students looking for help after they bomb the midterm.  The motivation for these sorts of people is primarily damage control, and once the problem is solved they intend to go back to business as usual.  They see private tutoring as a last resort tactic, sort of like stopping at a gas station and asking for directions. 

Although online tutoring has been around for a while, many students (and their parents) haven’t yet caught on to the possibility of meeting with a tutor virtually, let alone come to recognize its benefits.  Once the idea moves from the realm of theory to the realm of actuality, however, attitudes generally change from skepticism and incredulity to enthusiasm and appreciation.

Much like telecommuting and virtual commerce for other businesses, online tutoring provides a number of distinct advantages that not only make it competitive with in-person tutoring, but actually superior in many cases.  Here are a few of them.

1.  Availability