Dear UniversityTutor,

I’d like to work on my profile to see if I can make it more appealing to potential clients. What are your thoughts on free/discounted trial sessions for students?

Sincerely,
Super Tutor

Dear Super Tutor,

A free first session is certainly one option, but I personally prefer offering a money back guarantee on the first session.  It eliminates the risk to potential clients and makes them feel more comfortable while still ensuring you are compensated for your time.

If you’re talking to a potential client on the phone you can say something like “this is really just a trial session to see if it’s a good match, if you don’t feel like you got what you wanted out of it then there’s no charge and we can part ways on good terms”.  This will make them feel much more comfortable about your price, and willing to try it out.  In my experience, you will almost always get paid after the first session using this arrangement and it will drastically increase the number of first meetings you get.  Any reasonable person will be happy to compensate you once they see you are genuinely helpful and know the material well.  In fact, the only time I didn’t get paid using this was when I really felt like I couldn’t help the person and decided not to charge them anything.

The first session really is just that, a test to see if it works for both of you.  You’ll make most of your money as a tutor from repeat business – students that you meet with week after week for months or years.  The first session is just to get your foot in the door and demonstrate that you know your stuff so that you can find a few of these students to be your regulars.

I personally think that every tutor should offer a money back guarantee on the first session, and display this prominently on their profile.  If you still aren’t sold on the idea, consider this: if after the first session a client is unhappy with how the tutoring went and refuses to pay, what are you going to do?  There really isn’t much you can do.  My point here is that you are ALREADY offering a money back guarantee, you just may not know it yet.  If the money back guarantee is there anyway, then you might as well display it up front and center, and attract some new business because of it.

Hope it helps!
Brian Armstrong

P.S. If you have a question of your own, feel free to submit it and it may appear in the future blog post.

While studying and practicing can help improve test taking scores, there is something more important, especially for success on the SAT.  Because a large part of the test focuses on reading and writing skills, extensive vocabulary is a must.  This can be gained through practice.  There are lists of good vocab in SAT study books.  There are “word of the day” calendars and emails, and you can buy flash cards and study guides.  The best way to improve vocabulary, however, is to read.  By reading, I do not mean pulp, or Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel.  I mean classic books.  Authors like Dickens and Hugo can be difficult to tackle in any situation, especially six weeks before the SAT.  Even more fast-paced books such as The Three Musketeers and the Lord of the Rings Series (yeah, the books, seriously read them) can be difficult to get through.  The main point should be to focus on the vocabulary usage in the writing.

The chosen book should be by an author who really knows his or her English (for example, Tolkien was an English professor).  Fantasy and science fiction books, however, such as Tolkien’s or Herbert’s (Dune) are not the most appropriate because they may confuse some students with their made up words (character names, places).  Because of these, students with little experience in literature might confuse these made up words with real words or be unable to find good context clues.  For these reasons, works of historical fiction, biography, or simple novels would be better.  They provide normal writing structures, vocabulary, and experience in how English writing should sound (for proofreading skills).

To a recent tutee, I suggested reading “Twilight” after hearing my mother read it to my reluctant little brother.  She had to stop every few minutes to explain a word’s meaning or a metaphor to him.  Although the book does not have the most complex vocabulary, it does have the necessary depth to instill new words into a reader who is paying attention.  I suggested this book to the tutee because she, like many high school juniors, does not have much time to dedicate to reading.  For this reason, “Twilight” is appropriate because it is enjoyable, as well as being not too long or involved.

Although getting a student to read before the test to increase vocabulary skills is a good idea, the problem begins with the student’s education before his or her arrival in the junior year.  The lack of reading experience of good literature is the cause of this problem for students.  While catching up in the months and weeks before the SAT is a necessary object for students, they would be better prepared by reading in the years before the SAT.  Additionally, their vocabulary would be much improved if their parents read to them at a young age.

In summary, flashcards and rote memorization are often neglected by students studying vocabulary.  Reading is a great alternative that can be enjoayble and effective at the same time.

This was also a big change to our business model.  While in the past we charged tutors a monthly fee of $10/month to keep a profile on our site (after trying it for free and getting 3 tutoring job requests), we switched to charging a 15% fee on any online payments and there were no monthly fees for tutors.

So far we’ve gotten mixed reviews on this and we’re considering getting rid of the online payments as a business model.  Overall, it hasn’t been as successful as we hoped.  In this post I’d like to layout some thoughts on it from UniversityTutor’s perspective, and (most importantly) get your feedback on how we can best serve the UniversityTutor community going forward!

Some thoughts on the “new” business model charging a 15% fee on online payments:

Advantages

• No monthly fees for tutors means faster growth (tutors aren’t kicked off the site after their free trial is up – about 1 in 10 tutors chose to pay the monthly fee after their free trial was up)
• It’s more fair that “we only make money if you make money” and there is no up front cost or leap of faith required on the tutors part
• We can now track total number of hours tutored as an indicator of a tutor’s experience
• It can be convenient for a tutor to have funds deposited to their bank account or to send an invoice later if the parent could not come to the session

Disadvantages

• Many tutors do not get paid online to avoid the fee, despite the advantages of getting reviews and experience
• Many students/parents also (understandably) prefer to avoid the fee
• It can take longer in some cases for the tutor to get paid (direct deposit takes 3-5 business days)
• Some students/parents are not comfortable entering credit card information online with an unknown service
• It’s not simple – billing and paying customers (with our fee included) is more confusing for tutors and students and increases overhead in answering support emails, chargebacks, etc.

The online payment system (at least in it’s current state) is not feasible for us going forward in terms of profitability.  Adoption of it has been very slow and many tutors/students prefer to avoid it altogether.  To be clear, we don’t blame them for this.  It can be a major hassle to get paid online if a student/parent is unclear with the process, or if cash or check is right there after the session.  (I’m not sure I would myself want to use an online payment system in some situations.)

Yet, we do need to figure out a way to keep the lights on as a business, and hopefully continue to grow and expand to 20,000 or 50,000 tutors in new cities and countries (and attract new parents and students via marketing).

So I’ve decided to put the question out to YOU, the UniversityTutor community (tutors, parents, and students) :

Would you like to see the online payment system go or stay?  Where is it hurting or helping?

Would you (tutors) be willing to pay a fee to keep your profile on UniversityTutor?  If so, what form should it take and what would be a reasonable amount?

What can we do to make using UniversityTutor more profitable and enjoyable for you?

Please click below to post a comment and thank you for your feedback!  We really appreciate it.

Sincerely,
Brian Armstrong

P.S. I should also mention that if we do decide to eliminate the 15% fee on online payments, it will most likely NOT be possible to keep online payments as an option (just without the fee).  The reason is that we incur about a 5% cost in each transaction (both for billing a credit card and sending a direct deposit, plus monthly fees).  Even if we charged a 5% fee to cover costs, the additional support emails and chargebacks make it a risky business proposition.  As an alternative, if tutors still wanted to accept online payments they could use a service such as Paypal to send invoices (although Paypal caries it’s own fees).  Thanks again for your feedback!

I am a tutor at universitytutor.com. I really love your website and the recent innovations you have made including client rating and profile updates.

I just saw an email in regards to you setting up a new system with clients paying a markup on tutoring. I don’t know how efficiently this will work.

I work as a tutor and I am also currently going to school. It seems like a lot of money to pay by students just for getting tutored, they might also go to other websites or go to school learning centers to get the necessary aid.

Does this sound logical? I am just sending my thoughts and concerns because I really love your website.

Sincerely,
[name removed]

Hi [name removed],

Thanks for the email, I really appreciate your feedback! I think you’re right that the markup could cause a problem for some students. You may want to keep any existing clients you already have at your old rate so they don’t get an unexpected price bump. This tends to upset people more in my experience – unexpected changes – whereas if if a student knows the price up front then its unlikely to be an issue.

As for future clients, I don’t think it will be as a big of an issue as you might think. I know that when I first started tutoring, I “went out on a limb” and decided to charge $35 per hour which sounded like a lot to me. People paid and things went fine. I started meeting other tutors who claimed to be charging as much as $60 or $80 per hour, and I didn’t really believe it, but as I got busier I decided to raise my prices from $35 to $45. I figured I’d lose a good chunk of people but it was ok because I was getting busy. Remarkably, of the 30 or so clients I had setup with a bunch of tutors (it wasn’t just me at this point) I think only one expressed concern and decided to stop. There was zero drop in new business.

A few years later I had a “real job” and decided I wouldn’t have time for tutoring, but just as an experiment I’d put my rate at $65/hr just in case someone was really desperate. Incredibly, I saw no drop in business and new clients kept coming in at this rate. By the way, my “real job” was paying $25/hr so that tells you something.

Of course, by this time I had quite a lot of experience tutoring, but part of it was just that I didn’t realize how valuable it was to some people. In some professions (accounting, medicine, etc) it’s not uncommon to charge $500 per hour and up. Is it worth it? Well, if you REALLY need the IRS to get off your back or REALLY need your new kidney to work correctly, then yes it might be worth it. Similarly, if you REALLY need to pass biology this year, it might be worth it if you are the best biology tutor in town.

While there is occasionally free tutoring to be found (of dubious quality), keep in mind that your main competition comes from big tutoring companies like Kaplan and Silvan who have million dollar marketing budgets. These companies often sell their tutoring in “blocks” or “classes” which hide the true dollar per hour figures, but if you price it out it’s not uncommon for these classes to cost upwards of $85 per hour (and the markup on that is about 50% so the tutor is getting half). By these standards, the tutors on UniversityTutor.com are a steal.

I’ve actually been surprised by the prices that most tutors are putting on the website around $20 or $30 per hour. Every market is different, but in general I think most of the tutors on the site are pricing themselves too low. I don’t blame them because when I was a college student and the best jobs on campus paid $10 per hour, I didn’t believe it was possible either. But tutoring is not a commodity like a gallon of gasoline where the only way to compete is on price. Some tutors are much better than others and can command a much higher price. For better or worse, price is often used as an indicator of quality when people shop so it’s even possible that putting a higher price could actually result in MORE inquires from students who are looking to hire the best.

Anyway, I hope this helps and thanks for the feedback! We always like to hear from our users.

Thank you,
Brian Armstrong
www.UniversityTutor.com

Now you can get invoices by email and pay your tutor securely online by credit card. Tutors will receive funds either by direct deposit right to their bank account or via Paypal.

Our site uses 128bit encryption for all sensitive data and your credit card information is never stored on our servers. It is stored offline at a PCI Compliant data center. Look for the “https” prefix in the URL or the yellow lock icon in your web browser when entering payment info – this lets you know data is being encrypted before it is sent.

Our business model has changed as well. Now, instead of charging tutors $10/month to keep a profile up, we’ve switch to a 5-15% fee on tutoring completed through our site. Now we only get paid if you get paid – there are no up front costs or monthly fees.

Fully integrated payments brings us closer to a true marketplace website such as eBay.com, eLance.com, or Guru.com. With it come better “credibility indicators” that allow people to make buying decisions online. Here are two:

• Now students can *only* leave a tutor a review after completing a transaction through our site. This ensures tutors aren’t receiving “fake” reviews and they have actually worked with a student before getting a review.
• We are now tracking the number of hours a tutor has completed through our site. This will eventually become an indicator of how experienced they are. Client will be able to sort tutors by “most experienced”.

If existing clients are already used to using cash or check there is no reason to force them to switch over if they don’t want to. It’s optional for now. But it’s a good idea to start transitioning to online payments in the future because tutors will only be able to get reviews and increase their tutoring hours (which is displayed on their profile) by completing transactions online. This will allow them to remain competitive and charge higher rates in the future.

Finally, here is a demo video of the new features:

Or here is the same video on YouTube if you prefer to watch it there:

Feel free to leave us any feedback in the comments below. Thank you!

For example:

• We verify enrollment by asking students to enter their .edu email address.  But some universities only issue .edu emails to faculty, not students.
• Some schools issue student emails under a different domain (e.g. grizmail.umt.edu instead of umontana.edu)
• Some students don’t check their university email account as often as their regular mail (such as gmail, yahoo, etc)

Worse still, we’ve had a whole bunch of VERY qualified tutors that we’ve had to turn away simply because they no longer had their student email.  Some of them are recent graduates, Phd’s, certified teachers, etc.

So to fix this we made a decision: why not open up UniversityTutor to anyone who wants to tutor!

With the review system in place we can maintain a high level of quality, and this will really be the best option for everyone (students included who will now have a greater selection).

So as of today you’ll notice that we no longer ask you for your university or a .edu email address when you sign up:

Better Communication With More Prominent Tutor Names

Making the above change prompted another one.  To improve communication between tutors and students, we decided to make tutor names more visible on their profiles (just first name and last initial).  We got feedback (on our user feedback forum) that this was sometimes a nuisance to match the right tutor (who’s picture was visible) with the right name.

Tutors can of course change their display name if they’d prefer it not to be visible, but we hope most tutors will appreciate the additional visibility on their profile.

We hope you find these changes useful and we’ll continue to bring you more as we move forward!
UniversityTutor.com Staff

The image below gives you a rough idea of the wide range of tutors we have signed up now, and it will only continue to grow.  Click the image to try it out for yourself!

This obviously has some potential for online tutoring, but are they really ready?

Online tutoring has been “just around the corner” for a long time now, but the technology always seemed to get in the way:

• Writing math formulas and diagrams was always much faster by hand than over a computer screen
• Internet connections can get dropped or have delays
• Some solutions required custom software to be installed or for the user to be tech savvy in other ways

Here are some potential solutions I’ve seen come out recently.  These are all “web based” solutions which in my opinion is the only way this type of software will be successful.  By making it web based it eliminates the need for users to install any software, to both be on a certain type of operating system (Windows, Mac, etc), or to configure internet connection ports – problems which plague many screen sharing apps.  It also allows you to use any computer with an internet connection, so you can work at home, school, or wherever is convenient.

Adding an online tutoring option to CollegeStudentTutors.com is something I’d love to do given the right solution.

1. Thinkature.com

This nifty little app looks like it came out a few years ago.  It has a clean and simple interface and it’s free.  The only problem is that developmet on this app appears to have stopped.  After creating a new account I couldn’t get a new meeting set up (it just said “loading” forever).  There are a number of posts on their forum from users suggesting that the project and site have been abandoned by the original creators.

It’s a shame because this app has great potential.  Thinkature owners: if you are reading this and don’t have time to pursue the project, do the world a favor and release it as open source code!  Please let the world take the next step with this excellent project you’ve started.

2. Twiddla.com

Of all the sites I’ve tested so far, this one seems to have the most potential.  It has a ton of neat features, is easy to use, and even has support for some math formulas that would make it ideal for online tutoring.

While it appears to still be under active development (unlike Thinkature) I unfortunately still ran into some reliability issues.  I consistently got a message in the chat window about the network connection being broken and the voice chat feature didn’t appear to work at all.  While you could potentially get around the voice chat problem with a separate Skype connection or regular phone call, it further complicates the process and makes it less likely to work for a non-tech savvy user.

I do like how they made it drop dead simple to start a new online session (no account required) and of course it’s free.  It really is amazing that this product is released for free at all, given that it surely required thousands of man hours to produce.  I can also greatly sympathize with the issues I saw, since they are among the most difficult problems in computer science to solve (synchronization, latency, etc).  Twiddla is truely a grand effort that is dangerously close to becoming the perfect solution.  If the reliability can be improved I could see this becoming a staple of online tutoring.

3. Google Docs

Google’s growing online office suite offers some real time collaboration tools which may work.  Their Excel knockoff “Spreadsheets” offers the most promising solution for math or business type tutoring.

As you can see, two (or more) people can edit a spreadsheet at the same time.  Each user has a different color cell border so you can see what the other person is doing.  While one person is editing a particular cell, it is greyed out so you don’t both try to edit it at the same time.  This article has a great overview of the Google Docs online collaboration tools.

Their documents tool (similar to Microsoft Word) also has some potential for online tutoring of writing, essays, etc.  Unfortunately it’s not very easy to see exactly what the other person is editing in real time, which limits it’s usefulness.

Conclusion

Overall I haven’t found the perfect tool (yet) for online tutoring.  Cisco has a commercial app called WebEx which I’d like to review but their demo is down.  Tutor.com also apears to use their own desktop-based proprietary software, but I don’t have any way to test it out or use it.  As stated before, I don’t think a desktop solution is the way to go.

Currently, the technology available still feels like its getting in the way more than it is facilitating the process of online tutoring.

What other online collaboration tools did I miss?  Would you like to see more online tutoring offered in the future?  Let me know in the comments below.

1. “We don’t have to stick to any educational standards.”
News of failing schools and the increasing competitiveness of colleges have made education a big concern for parents. To the rescue, perhaps, comes the “supplemental education” business, an estimated $2 billion-and-growing industry that includes private tutors, retail tutoring centers and test-preparation centers.

While schools must now meet federally mandated standards, these criteria don’t apply to supplemental education companies. “You could end up with an excellent tutor who put up a flier at the grocery store, or a crummy tutor from a national organization,” says David Hollingsworth, a private tutor in New York City who trained with test-prep powerhouse Kaplan.

To get the best help possible, start with a reliable referral — say, a favorite teacher at your child’s school — then focus on credentials and experience. Ask learning centers where they find tutors and if they do background checks; if tutors are certified teachers, that’s a good sign. Then get references: Ask past clients if the child’s grades went up, if the tutor was reliable and, most important, if the tutor and child had a good rapport. As Hollingsworth says, “You need someone who’s good with kids.”

2. “Our rates aren’t always pinned to quality.”
Costs for tutoring can vary wildly, depending on whether your child gets private or group tutoring, and whether he receives it in-home or at a center. “In general, anywhere from $35 to $65 an hour is what you’re going to be paying for good tutoring,” says Gene Wade, CEO of Platform Learning, a New York-based firm that develops tutoring programs for public schools. But if you’re looking for specialized tutoring, including SAT test prep, or live in a big city, the costs can multiply. In Boston rates can range from $50 to $125 an hour; in New York City they can go as high as $400 an hour.

Continue reading…