Will Online Tutoring Replace In-home Tutoring?

With the rise of online learning over the past decade, many parents (and tutoring companies for that matter) want to know if online tutoring will end up replacing in-home tutoring. Online tutoring has some advantages: it is convenient, it is often on demand so it doesn’t have to be scheduled, it is more flexible, and it is often cheaper than an in-person tutor.

All this is true, but it is also true that online tutoring cannot replace the human interaction side of tutoring. In our experience, we know that in-home tutoring gives students an opportunity to develop a relationship with their tutors. This is extremely important – the rapport that a student develops is critical to the improvement of the student—this is why we spend so much time searching for tutors who are engaging, caring, and dynamic in addition to being knowledgeable. We believe in the importance of this relationship, because we have seen such wonderful, rapid progress with the in-person tutoring model. The personal relationship with the tutor, and the ability for the tutor to command the student’s attention, observe how the student works with pencil and paper, and pick up on visual cues allows the tutor to tailor the session to exactly what the student needs, and to pick up on learning gaps nonverbally.

For example, a student hesitates while working a problem. Where did she hesitate? What mistake did he write down and scribble out? How is she structuring her scratch work? How organized is the student approach? In a live tutoring session, face to face, a tutor can ascertain all of this by observation while the student is working. The online tutoring model cannot match that.

Online tutoring, when appropriately applied, can be a convenient, flexible and less expensive way for a student to get help. However, it is our belief that the advantages of in-person tutoring will allow it to survive the technology revolution. We believe that online and in-home tutoring are best used together, in a blended model. In a blended model, a student gets all the benefits of in-person tutoring and online tutoring all wrapped up in one.