In our earlier discussion on peer tutoring, we pointed out that students learn better through their peers because it is felt that at some point of time, even they would have gone through the same doubts or difficulties and having mastered them themselves, they can now teach their students or juniors the same concepts in a way that fosters better understanding.
Perhaps, this is the reason why Ivy Insider Prep was formed and is now doing exceptionally well. Owned by the RevolutionPrep Inc., the Ivy Insiders tutors the high school seniors in SAT subjects. The teachers are the undergraduate students at the Ivy League colleges who sign up to teach the SAT aspirants and test takers in their hometown district. Naturally, the Ivy Insider sessions are delivered during the summers when the college students come home for the vacation. It is a great way for them to use their vacations productively, but the ultimate benefactors are the high school juniors and seniors who get to study directly from the people who have made it to the best colleges in the country.
The SAT prep courses offered by Ivy Insiders are relatively cheaper in comparison to the courses offered by other institutes and tutoring centers. In three weeks’ time, the students get to sharpen their mathematics, vocabulary and critical reading skills with 36 hours of intensive peer tutoring sessions. The students study in small groups of maximum four to five students. The total cost of such a set up is $599 and students who have attended these SAT tutoring sessions have reported a jump of as much as 400 points in their SAT scores.
The organization is not strictly for profit, because it does charge $599 for its regular course and $899 for its Hybrid Course (that includes 4 hours of strictly one-on-one tutoring), but again, compared to the cost the parents are already incurring for their students’ education, this one will not hurt that much because the chances of success are on the higher side.
Peer tutoring refers to a learning experience where the tutor and the tutee are peers, that is at the same academic level (sometimes, the tutor being a grade or two senior, but at the end of the day, both of them are nothing but ‘students’!). Peer tutoring is learning from your peers, the same concepts that you are not able to learn from your teacher or the elderly lady who gives you private tuitions twice a week. The students are often too much in awe of their teachers or tutors to share their academic queries or other concepts. This they are able to relate in a better and more comfortable fashion with their peers, without the fear of being scolded or worse, the teacher complaining to the parents. Read more…
When it comes to high school and college freshman level subject tutorials, the entire buzz around the World Wide Web is being created by a single site: www.khanacademy.org. The founder of KhanAcademy, Salman Khan and his team of innovators describe the venture as one driven purely by the need to revolutionize the highly commercialized education system. The over 2100 free tutorials videos can be accessed by almost anybody on the World Wide Web. Students, teachers, parents, academicians, tutors and almost anybody with an interest in the knowledge process can benefit from the pool of knowledge at the Khan Academy. Read more…
Even I am at my wit’s end as to how to draw the line between the two! I have had teachers all my life, attended tuitions for Maths and Science and incidentally I teach a class of 45 and tutor a couple of students in economics. How is the role of teacher different from that of a tutor?
Let us examine what Wikipedia has to say in this regard:
“A teacher (or, in the US, educator) is a person who provides schooling for pupils and students. A teacher who facilitates education for an individual student may also be described as a personal tutor. The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out by way of occupation or profession at a school or other place of formal education.” Read more…
What was once an obscured part of the mainstream education system is poised to be integrated into it to give rise to a rather stylish term known as “blended learning”. Yes, we are talking about the tutoring services, traditional or online, that have changed the form of education system in all the countries of the world. According to the Education Times, a publication of Times News Network, these tutoring centers are a parallel universe of education, existing alongside the schools and universities.
There was a time when contracting tutors meant the student was not smart enough to grasp the lessons at school. This was a decade back and parents were rather reluctant to admit that their children needed the help of private tuitions! Fast forward to the 21st century and today engaging private tutors and paying them close to $1000 per month has become a status symbol, so much so that if a student is not taking tuitions, there could be only two social reasons behind it: either the parents do not care about their child’s academic success or they are too poor to afford it, as a Korean mother of two laments. Read more…
The already high cost of education notwithstanding, many parents are signing their kids up for tutoring programs if they are struggling in a subject, are low on confidence, faltering around grades or just because everybody else is engaging tutors, so they also need to do that!
The last reason is equally true as all the other reasons given above. According to a survey done by the Canadian Education Council, 73 percent of the students who took remedial help through tutoring were already good at learning, getting A or B grades in their regular school curriculum. Agreed that the twice weekly sessions with their tutors reinforced their confidence and improved their grades, but the rhetoric that arises here is: could they have accomplished the same without external help or a little help and guidance from their parents? Read more…
The omnipresence of the World Wide Web serves as the best and seemingly inexpensive way to connect people around the globe. It does not really matter if they are buyers and sellers or teacher and student. The need of one is readily and more efficiently supplied by the other, the barriers of time, place and accessibility notwithstanding. Tutoring is one such profession which has really come of age . Online tutoring has seen a tremendous growth in last 5 years and that is not without a reason.
Some of the advantages of online tutoring are :
Transcending Time and Distances: Online tutoring creates time and place utility for thousands of students who can log on to the tutor’s site and get their queries answered at virtually any time of the day, irrespective whether they are travelling, are out for picnic, are on their way home from school or snug beneath the blankets in their room. The round the clock accessibility is a boon because now they do not have to wait until the next session with their tutor to get their doubts cleared. Read more…
