What does the tutoring landscape look like in 2022?

Online tutoring continues to grow at a fast pace and so do different apps and tools that assist you during your teaching journey. There are so many tutoring platforms available like Preply, TutorMe and others that you can register as a private tutor and start teaching right away, or at least when someone finds you out of the thousands of other tutors. But the problem is that most of them take huge commissions of up to 50% (or more, for newcomers) from what you earn. They also charge students a lot, which reduces overall student count per teacher. Also, they have lots of tutors so breaking through and being at the top is difficult. Thus, it does not turn out to be a reasonable investment because your input is not paid off as much as it could have been.

The same is true on the students’ side - they do not benefit from it either because they pay a high price for tutoring and often get a demotivated tutor in return.

So now the question is “What can you do?”

The short answer is that you can use the right combination of tools to organize your tutoring process, making it either very cheap or totally free. And the long answer is what this article is all about. Below, we present an array of handy apps and tools that will help you throughout your tutoring journey.

Free tools to organize your tutoring

There are plenty of tools that let you organize your lessons and materials, or a whole tutoring school for free. They help you to make the teaching processes more systemized all the way from presenting the material, communicating with learners to assigning homework, etc. Here are some useful tools that you can consider incorporating into your teaching practice:

Skype and Google Meet

These online video conferencing apps allow you to hold tutoring classes by bringing a large group of people together. They support up to 100 users at once and are available for desktop, web and mobile. Both of them are secure and reliable solutions with full data protection and in-transit encryption. Their user-friendly interface allows to easily navigate through them and intuitively take tons of actions. Share screen, record the meeting, chat during the meeting and many more are right at your fingertips to make your tutoring process straightforward. Google Meet is also integrated with Google Calendars, making scheduling and bookings easier.

Kahoot

Interactive teaching and Kahoot are like synonyms. As a game-based learning platform, it makes learning so engaging and fun. You can create quizzes with different question types such as multiple choice, true/false and image-based in a couple of minutes. The best part of it is that it shows the top 3 players in a beautiful podium at the end of the game. This encourages students to put more effort to score higher and reach top positions next time. Thus, it becomes a two-sided win- you check your students’ knowledge while making it a fun experience and it ultimately results in increased performance.

Trello

Tutoring assumes lots of planning, organizing and communicating and you can’t get all these done without a handy tool. Trello gives you a visual view of your work processes such as assigning coursework, creating to-do lists and making assessments. It uses Kanban system to organize your workflow and breaks it down into boards, lists and cards for a clear view. In this way you can easily track the entire workflow, coordinate important activities and complete everything on time.

Miro

If you’re tutoring online, then collaboration should be on top. This is exactly what Miro is all about. It is a digital whiteboard that unites everyone to work together. You can share ideas, write them down with sticky notes and move things around to come up with your perfect visual view. With the help of these, your brainstorming sessions and discussions end up being much more organized and streamlined. Its visual templates allow to add different types of content such as text and images, so that you can communicate your ideas more effectively.

Google Docs

We believe that this is the tool that comes to everyone’s mind first when talking about collaborative spaces, so we couldn’t miss addressing it. With Google Docs you can write and edit right in your web browser with no installation required. If you have a Google Account then you have access to Google Docs, it’s that simple. It allows multiple people to work together on the same document simultaneously. All the comments and changes are automatically saved and viewed by everyone in real time. When you have finished your work, you can export it in a variety of formats such as Microsoft Word, PDF, Plain text etc.



Building your own website

As a tutor you have built your own curriculum and have your own teaching methods, techniques and practices that make you stand out. But when you are teaching in an online tutoring platform you have to match with their pre-built structures and systems. As a result you may not be able to work with your full proficiency because you have to make some changes in your teaching process. But why let it affect your professionalism, when there is a simple way to not to? And that simple way is to have your own website. You may think that having a personal website is a long and complicated process and has nothing to do with being simple, but we are here to show you the easy way. 

There are free website builders out there that allow you to use pre-designed templates, customize them and drag and drop different elements. No programming skills are needed and no design talent is required. Everything is pretty straightforward, you just have to select ready-made templates, add your content and publish.

As an education-niche website builder, Tutor Platform helps you to have a professional-looking website with minimum effort. It has all the needed features and functionalities for educational websites, thus saving you lots of time, money and effort. No need to hire a front-end developer, back-end developer, QA engineer, UI/UX designer- just have one easy-to-use tool as an answer to all this. Acquiring a domain is not a problem as well because some are available for $20 for 4 years.

As you see, everything is pretty affordable and you don’t need to have a huge budget to launch your website. With this minimum investment, you can achieve prominent results because it will improve your digital presence and increase your visibility. You can have a blog section in your website and write different articles that will bring traffic to your website. Potential students can land on one of your blog posts and discover your tutoring services in that way.

Connecting everything in one place

Apps, websites, tools and materials are great but if you use them individually they will not bring you any value. It will be so difficult and time-consuming to constantly switch between multiple apps. That’s why all your tools and apps need to go together, so that you can have a seamless learning experience. This is when learning management systems come to help. But the problem is that some popular LMSs do not support individual tutors. They are in the B2B market and are focused on internal training. And being geared towards big corporations means high pricing which private tutors cannot afford.