Wondering If You Can Start Your Online Tutoring Business? Some Tips To Get You Started
Online tutoring is a profitable business. This industry is developing rapidly with advent of innovations, technologies and wide spread usage of the internet. Parents and students are comfortable with online tutoring websites for their personalized learning requirements. Life of an online tutor is full of fun and rewards, both intellectually and fiscally. They get to work with students from varied cultural backgrounds and geographic territories. Through one-on-one sessions, they help students to accomplish to their maximum potential.
According to our experience, once a tutor understands advantages of online tutoring, it is more about where to begin, rather than if I have to start. For most potential tutors, the main inquiry is "Where do I start?". If you are one of the similar perspective online tutors, the points given below will help you in getting started.
Requirements To Become An Online Tutor
Generally, online tutors are professional teachers and subject-area experts. Having one of these in your credential list helps a student trust you as a tutor:
- Teaching certification or teaching experience.
- Masters degree or PhD.
- Subject specific certification.
Although these requirements are not rigid, having these will certainly help you in getting attention and trust from students and parents. It is said that exceptions are always there, with respect to requirements.
About Online Tutoring Students
The larger part of online tutoring students are middle and high school students, those who are preparing for SAT or GRE, and so forth exams. These students need to be helped in maths, sciences, and English. Apart from these, some tutors also teach students technology or even guide them through college admission process. They also provide mentoring, career counseling, etc.
How To Become An Online Tutor And Start Tutoring
Given below is the standard process to become an online tutor. This is a standard process, and may vary for different online tutoring companies.
- Register as an online tutor in a good online tutoring company.
This is a standard process. You will have to fill the online form providing your credentials, basic bio information, profile photo, tutoring preferences etc. Some companies also ask for certificates, proof of education, and ID. - Verification and approval of profile.
The company’s support team verifies and approves your profile. Some companies also do a criminal record check of your profile, as well. After this, your profile will be made public to the students. - Get familiar with the online collaboration tools.
In all major online tutoring companies, it is the support team that walks through all the incoming tutors with the entire platform. This is good practice especially for new tutors who don’t have much experience in online teaching. It is advisable for tutors, who handle subjects like maths and science, to have a digital writing pen and pad. This will help students understand better. - Start tutoring.
Based on the business model of your tutoring company, you may now start tutoring and earning money.
How To Tutor Online
Today’s online tutoring classrooms have all the tools required, which facilitates the 'one-to-one', or the 'one-to-many' tutoring session. In these sessions, you can do the following:
- Start a face-to-face video conferencing.
- Speak to each other with high-quality and excellent voice.
- Write, type, erase and draw in distinctive colors on digital advanced whiteboard.
- Text chat via instant messaging.
- Upload and share files.
- Alter message progressively with other person seeing what you are doing.
- Access the session from all devices.
Most tutoring organizations give a demo link to try whiteboard link. It is advisable that you go through all the features of the whiteboard in detail, before taking on your first tutoring session.
How To Attract More Students
Once your online tutor profile is endorsed, and you have few experience of couple of online sessions, you have to do the following things keeping in mind to attract more students to book more sessions with you:
- Update your profile.
Then, consider what your potential clients i.e, students want to hear from you. Include video message in your profile. This adds far more value than simple and basic content profile. - Ask your students to give you ratings and reviews.
Ratings and reviews should be apparent on your tutoring profile. Most ideal way would be to ask your students to rate you just after the session. The more and better reviews and ratings you have, the better are your chances to appear on the first page. - Availability is a big issue for most students.
If your available timings don't coordinate with the students, they won't book sessions with you. Continuously remember the time zone of your potential students. - Always respond to the session requests quickly.
In case you receive message from any enquiring student, be helpful to them.
We hope this little article was useful to you in understanding online tutoring.