To tutor or not to tutor.
This has been a question on the mind of parents since the beginning of systemized education. Tutoring is easily one of the ways to supplement your child’s learning needs and for a while, there was only one way to do that – offline home tutoring. Whether handled by a professional tutor or personally, offline home tutoring has been the default way that children get better results. In recent years, however, there has been a surge in online tutoring services and they have seen a lot of adoption especially since the 2020 CoVid-19 pandemic.
In this article, we’ll be comparing physical home lessons to online tutoring and showing you the pros and cons to help you find out which is better for you.
Home Lessons
A typical home lesson is a tutor coming to the house to meet with the student and help them with their academic struggles based on the information given by the student.
Pros
- It is hands-on: Because the teacher and the student are in close proximity to each other, there are very few distractions for either of them and they can focus completely on the tutoring session. This may cause the student to be more productive, and more open with their tutor.
- It is easy to find teachers: These days, most in-class teachers offer home lessons as well. This means that there is a large pool of tutors to choose from for your child.
Cons
- Inconvenience: If you live in a crowded city (like Lagos), online tutoring will most likely appeal to you. The inconvenience of traffic means that often times the tutor may not be able to make it at the best times. Moreso, the stress that comes from being stuck in traffic may affect both your ward’s and the tutor’s ability to learn and teach effectively.
- We are still in a global pandemic. This means that letting people into your house can put you and your family at risk of contracting the virus. Although there is already a vaccine, the vaccine adoption is still very slow and so it is still important that we take safety precautions.
- Long vetting process for teachers: Although there is a large pool of teachers to choose from, sometimes finding one who can address your child’s particular learning needs may take a long period of trial and error.
Gradely Online Tutoring
A Gradely tutor session is a 60-minute online session with an experienced tutor to help your child tackle their academic challenges. It appears quite similar to home lesson tutoring, but the dynamics surrounding it are quite different.
Once you book an online tutor session on Gradely for the first time, you are prompted to take a pretest on the Gradely app. This pretest has 15 questions, based on your child’s class and the selected subject. The result from this test comes in a topic-by-topic breakdown, showing the areas that your child needs help with, the areas they are excelling at and their overall mastery level of that subject. The tutor then uses this data to tailor all their sessions.
The tutor is also able to give homework on the Gradely app based on your child’s problem areas, with additional recommended support from the app in form of video lessons and practice questions to help the child further improve.
Pros
- Data-driven tutoring: This test gives the tutor more insight into the child’s abilities, in order to help them create the best lesson possible. This ensures that educational improvement is happening as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
- Convenience & Ease of Access: As opposed to physical tutoring, there are no commuting or logistic constraints that affect the tutor’s ability to show up for class. All that is needed is a device and access to the internet.
- Extra Learning Resources: Tutoring online with Gradely gives your child access to automatic access to recommended learning resources in-app such as practice questions, video lessons, and educational games, used in combination with the tutor’s efforts. The results and data from this makes it easier to for the tutor to understand and track the student’s learning progress.
- Fast feedback loop: Parents can be easily kept in the loop concerning their children’s studies in real-time. As a parent, you get weekly improvement reports from Gradely, showing your child’s learning improvement curve and mastery level per subject.
Cons
- Internet issues: Sometimes there can be network connection problems, especially in developing areas with low network bandwith. However, once a great connection is available, the tutor session goes on smoothly.
It can be difficult to make the right choice about what will work for your child, but we hope this has given you more insight. To try out our comprehensive tutoring experience for free, go to gradely.ng/page/tutoring/
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