Process control

Online tutoring is a person-to-person service. To ensure quality of interaction between the teacher and the student, robust quality monitoring and quality control mechanisms are necessary, especially while a session is going on.

Real time monitoring contributes significantly towards ensuring quality. Having an academic counselor apart from the teacher and reverse feedback mechanisms from student to the teacher and academic counselor helps build accountability.

Interestingly, several online tutoring providers follow a distributed model of teaching where the teacher teaches from his/her own home. Several other companies provide a matching service between online tutors and students. While both these models reduce the overheads, they make real time quality control quite difficult. For example, a ringing doorbell or a bawling kid in the background may completely ruin the continuity of a learning session in the teacher-teaches-from-home model.

Having a centralized teaching facility and the tutors as full time employees goes a long way in building and maintaining quality tutoring. The formal office environment generates professionalism and a shared service culture so very important in ensuring great person-to-person service.

Content quality

Content comprises of the teaching material, books, notes and exercises.

Since the basic premise of online tutoring is total personalization, using standard teaching material greatly reduces the effectiveness of instruction. Experience shows that a single concept can be taught in several different ways and different students respond differently to each of these approaches. Thus, it is important to assess which approach to take for which student and present the study material according to the same. Standard text or notes become pretty ineffective at this stage.

Thus, it is important for online tutoring providers to have dedicated content development function. The idea is to customize the study material as per the requirement of the learner so that benefits of personalization made possible by offshore online tutoring can be passed onto the student.

Technology & infrastructure

Technology and infrastructure play an extremely important role of a facilitator - great infrastructure and technology does not automatically ensure great teaching but lack of it does ensure no teaching.

The voice conferencing software, whiteboard etc should be reliable and not lead to wasted time in trying to get the session run smoothly.

Contrary to popular belief, teaching online students across half the earth calls for more than just a PC with broadband. It is important that the tutoring provider invests enough in infrastructure and processes to ensure quality tutoring consistently

Conclusion

Offshore online tutoring making quality personalized help accessible to all is a great promise. Quality control of service delivery is extremely important to impart effective learning.

Proper recruitment & training processes for tutors, real time process monitoring & control, content customization and adequate technology & infrastructure are extremely important to providing exceptional online tutoring, consistently.