Looking at scaling up your online tutoring business? Here’s 3 hurdles you need to overcome

Sharon is a full-time private tutor specialising in Maths for secondary school students. She has been conducting mainly one-to-one classes on the online platform Zoom since the start of the pandemic.

“Bringing my classes online keeps my students and myself safe. Plus it also gives me flexibility and cuts down on my travelling time and costs.” Sharon shares. “The only thing is, I have been thinking about moving from one-to-one classes to taking more students in a group class to increase my income. I’m just not sure how I can make that transition smoothly without compromising on the quality of teaching, or ending up with too much non-teaching work. And also managing any increase in my costs for different apps as well.”

If you are also in the same situation as Sharon with similar concerns, here are 3 hurdles you need to overcome before you can scale up your online tutoring business effectively.

The 3 Hurdles to scaling up your online tutoring business

1. Your attention to individual students will be reduced in a group class

While you are able to give 100% attention to a student in a one-to-one class, that attention and coaching will be divided when it comes to bigger group classes. This will be felt more keenly in online classes where tutors have only video thumbnails to try and decipher if their students are truly engaged in learning during lesson time.   

2. Current platforms are inadequate for effective online group classes

Video-conferencing software apps such as Zoom or Google Meet are the popular choices for online classes. While the cost is generally low, the format of teaching is often limited to lecture-style where tutors speak and students listen, leaving little room for interaction, or even allowing students to do work during class time and for you to supervise their class work.

There are other teaching apps to improve engagement or class-time work used to support online teaching on video-conferencing platforms. However this means you will have to juggle up to 4 or 5 different apps at the same time on top of actual teaching, leaving even less time and attention for coaching individual students and identifying their weaknesses.

3. More students means more non-teaching tasks

From preparing and sending lesson notes, downloading and sending out lesson recordings, to assigning homework and marking, having more students in a class means more of these non-teaching tasks to handle. On top of that, you will have to manage giving feedback to individual students on their submitted work and ensuring that they are indeed learning effectively. These tasks add up to more hours being spent on non-teaching tasks without being necessarily cost- or time-effective for you to scale up your tutoring businesses.

Is there anything available in the market to help tutors scale up their business effectively without compromising on teaching quality?

Even before the pandemic has upturned in-person lessons across the world, ClassDo has been developing an all-in-one online teaching platform that allows educators to easily deliver lessons effectively with as little tech knowledge and hassle. Our aim is to empower educators to implement personalised learning for individual students even in a group class, while reducing time spent on non-teaching tasks. More importantly, we talk extensively with educators like yourself to understand what tools are essential and what are unnecessary, building only what you need into our platform.

That’s why ClassDo is able to help you upscale your online tutoring business successfully with our integrated teaching tools.


1. Virtual desks allow you to coach students individually, even in a group class.

The desk is a personal space in your online classroom where students can work on their assignments individually. During a live session, you can easily:

• switch between classroom view where you share your teaching materials, and your students’ desk view to check on their progress and learning at any time.
• hand out work that is suitable for each learner’s ability and pace during a live lesson, and guide them individually during seat work.
• give each student 100% attention, even when in a group class.
  
  Check out how the desk works below: 
  

2. All the teaching tools you need in one integrated platform

If you have been managing your online classes with at least 4 or 5 different apps (one for video-conferencing, one for uploading notes/homework, one for making notes or sketching explanations during lessons, one for sharing multimedia materials etc), it’s time to ditch the hectic juggling act and opt for one single tool that can save you time and the grief of troubleshooting.

Within ClassDo’s online classroom, you have the flexibility to:

• upload all your learning materials in most supported formats (PDF, Powerpoint, jpg, Youtube), and the ease of retrieving them for lessons
• eliminate the need for screen-sharing from different apps
• use a dedicated file library holds all these content and serves as a storage space where students can also submit their assigned homework onto their individual desks
• simplify the submission and marking process for students and tutors.
• auto-save lesson recordings for students to watch replays at their own convenience.
• make annotations on the files during class, allowing both collaborative and individual learning. What’s more, these annotations are saved and can be referred to at any time from the library.
  
  Here’s another sneak peek at what your integrated online classroom looks like:
  

3. Again, integration makes life easier

Because of the various education-specific tools and workflows built into ClassDo, you can easily save time on non-teaching tasks such as handing out assignments and notes, checking on homework, or preparing for the lesson itself. This gives you both time and the bandwidth to coach students effectively during class time and still give each student the attention they need.

So if you’re thinking hard about scaling up your online tutoring business, why not try out ClassDo and experience how it can help you to deliver lessons effectively without compromising on teaching quality.

Click here to sign up for a free trial, and get 60 hours free!