Improving Learning Skills with an Online Tutor

Education provides the competitive edge to individuals in a world of survival of the fittest. And it is a well established fact that focusing on improving learning skills plays a pivotal role in overall development of a child.

But in this extremely fast paced era, can the parents or guardians be blamed for not grooming their wards or not arranging to pick and drop their children to tutoring classes?

Well, with technological advancement and efforts of all those behind the development of the concept of online tutoring, there is now a very simple solution for the convenience of ALL when it comes to improving learning skills. Feedback from parents reflected our vision to provide the best quality of education to students in the comfort of his/her home environment at his/her convenience.

The question now is how to ensure effectiveness of online tutoring to improve a student’s learning skills with subsequent improvement in grades, and up to what extent? And secondly, how to ensure effectiveness of the online tutor to impart learning skills to the student?

Will online tutoring improve students’ learning skills?

The most important step towards learning is inherent ‘interest’ to learn. If the student is not attracted to learning, then it becomes cumbersome to forcefully feed knowledge to him/her, and all efforts will be in vain as the child will have no interest to retain whatever was taught.

Online tutoring has transformed the learning process from shear torture to an enjoyable experience. Students nowadays are comfortable and attracted to any activity online. The user-friendly techniques developed recently has made learning online further enjoyable as students can interact with tutors at their own pace on the white board receiving individual attention from the tutor, while the tutors simultaneously can proceed tutoring students step-by-step feeling comfortable with the student’s ability to understand each concept.

The white board has all the tools necessary to interact in much the same way as each of them writing a formula or equation, entering values in tables, drawing graphs and correcting data on the same page simultaneously. An online tutor can provide examples to a student who can solve it on the spot and the tutor can provide hints to improve the student’s ability to discover mistakes. Thus the student has the benefit of face-to-face individual tutoring in his/her zone of comfort.

Techniques are available to store the work done, share documents, provide voluminous resources like textbook materials, exercises and workbooks, grading sheets, etc. which can be stored in a hard drive for future applications.

Technologically, online tutoring has crossed all the possible barriers of learning.

Will an online tutor have the ability to teach the student effectively?

Teaching is a great skill. A person may have a lot of knowledge and all the material like textbooks, workbooks, etc. But to impart knowledge to a student at the level that a student is comfortable to grasp, and continuously monitor a student’s absorption power and level of understanding is an art which is indeed much more difficult than what normally is perceived by people at large. These skills are indeed very rare amongst most tutors.

Our first criterion is to determine the academic qualifications and subject of specialization, accreditation or licensing status, and teaching experience of the prospective tutor. Teaching experience, for example, in a particular public school board will help the tutor to teach students enrolled in the schools of that school board in a much better way due to inherent advantage of the tutor who will be accustomed to that school board’s policies, course curriculum, evaluation and grading strategies, etc.

Next we probe the reason for the prospective tutor to enter into the tutoring business. This provides us the personal characteristics of the prospective tutor and his/her aptitude towards the teaching profession.

Tutors should have several soft skills other than academic knowledge; some of them are as follows:

Empathy and caring for the student has a very stimulating effect on the students. The students are more open to amicable tutors. This in turn helps the tutors to evaluate the level of understanding and limitations of the students correctly, thereby helping them devise teaching strategies specific to each student.

Punctuality is a very important factor which can make or break the relationship between the tutor and the student if not applied religiously.
Honesty and integrity play a large role in the emotional attachment of a student with a tutor. A tutor who keeps on forgetting to provide materials as promised, or forgets to evaluate and provide grades on a student’s work may leave a student almost devastated.

Communication skills play an equally vital role in imparting knowledge.

A hard working tutor can definitely be successful when it comes to improving learning skills if they thoroughly prepare the lessons before approaching the student. The online tutor should review his/her session on the same day to prepare notes or any special measures to be taken during the next session and they should be prepared with those steps as soon as possible.

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