ziizoo blog

One strategic question I’ve been pondering is what exactly is the current overlap and orientation of the online tutoring market with respect to the traditional, face-to-face tutoring market. Do they compete head-to-head, or is online tutoring just a niche segment? Are they just separate markets with marginal overlap? Are they meant to complement each other or are they bound to be distinct consumer choices within the same space? In some sense, the answer to this question should explain differences in market price, supply factors and demand factors. For one thing, it appears online tutoring has a lower equilibrium market price, generating an excess of student demand over supply of tutors for the moment. But this question should also make you think about how online tutoring can have distinct advantages over what can be accomplished in the conventional setting. Being able to identify and jump on these advantages should enhance your tutoring ability and your motivation to embrace this new platform.

• Online tutoring can happen anytime, anywhere without the inconvenience of travel. All you need to do to operate within this market is just be available when you can (even if your main purpose at times is just to surf the web!). Students welcome the fact that they can consult a tutor on whim and in real-time–it’s as if we were on-call. This becomes especially important during those often important desperation hours between 9pm to as far into the night as possible, hours that are generally out-of-play for traditional tutors. Some of us tend to be midnight owls, and that can easily work into our advantage.
• Online tutoring gives you flexibility to leverage resources that may seem awkward in a traditional setting. Remember: when you’re on a session, it’s very easy to discreetly verify a concept, a formula/equation or a fact without interrupting the session and without insinuating a lack of confidence in the material.  For example, when tutoring higher-level math, I usually have http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ as a reference, or when I’m tutoring chemistry, I usually have readily open a periodic table (I use http://www.dayah.com/periodic/) and ChemFinder (to verify structural formulas).
• Detailed and digitized recordkeeping is also a boon to online tutoring.  The Ziizoo platform has built-in features that allow detailed transcripts of sessions to be generated while any markup on the whiteboard can be easily saved as images.  In this case, students can refer back to content discussed during a session, and they can also look back on diagrams and figures that back up those explanations.   In addition, they can save these records as needed in digital form, which is more exportable than old-fashioned written notes, which is often scanned with suboptimal quality.
• Online tutoring also offers opportunities to establish high-level coordination and referral networks among tutors, so that even tutors can easily refer students to other tutor-colleagues who may be more equipped to handle a particular subject.  There is even the foreseeable potential for tutors to coordinate their style and methods when working with the same student on different subjects.

Competitive advantage is really the driver of value and organic growth in any market, so if we seek to extract our own value through this mode of tutoring, we will need to identify and accentuate the features and capabilities that give online tutoring that extra edge!  Is there anything else you guys can think of?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 3:44 am and is filed under Faculty Lounge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.