You have made the decision that you or your child is in need of a tutor and you have examined your possible choices. You believe that online tutoring may be the right choice because of all of the benefits that it provides. An online tutoring service provides an excellent means for you or your child to get the necessary help but you need to keep in mind that it also may have a few drawbacks that you should consider before making your final decision. There are five factors that you need to take into account before choosing online tutoring.
Online tutoring can at times suffer from a lack of human interaction. This can cause your chosen tutor to be slower to recognize potential problems than someone who is sitting right next to you or your child. Some potential problems that it might take longer to recognize are dyslexia and ADHD. It is also more difficult for the tutor to notice when your child’s attention span is wavering.
Online tutoring requires a certain computer proficiency and technological savvy that you or your child may not have. Most children have grown up with computers and use them in school so they should be proficient enough, but what about the parents. Even if the child can perform all the necessary tasks, the parents won’t be able to monitor the progress very well if they do not understand how the system works.
Online tutoring requires a computer and reliable internet access. While you will not need a brand new top of the line computer, the computer you are planning to use should not be more than a few years old or it may not be able to handle the needed software. You need to have high speed internet access that you can count on. Dial up won’t get the job done and neither will internet service that is constantly going down.
There is no way to verify the credentials of the tutor. You are trusting the online tutoring company to have done a good job verifying the credentials and backgrounds of the people they hire. While most companies are very good at this aspect you have no way to check these things yourself. You have to trust that the company did its due diligence and did not make any mistakes in its hiring process.
Online tutoring is a different learning environment. Some students do not adapt well to online tutoring. Every one learns in a different manner and, while online tutoring can encompass many different ways of trying to teach the information, some people are just not going to be able to learn that way.
In most cases online tutoring is an excellent choice and will do a wonderful job of helping you or your child accomplish your goals. It is, however, not for everyone. It is easy to get lost in all of the hype when you see all of the ways that online tutoring can help, but as with all things in life you must look at the bad as well as the good before you make that final determination.