In Britain 24%, of
students are getting tutoring, rising to 40% in London according to The Sutton
Trust. In Germany 15% of children are getting help with tutors. According to a
2011 report by the European Commission, in Eastern European Member States, the
decline in teachers’ salaries was a great influence on the rise of private
tutoring during the 1990s.
The tutoring landscape is expansive yet across
Europe the tutoring rates vary greatly. In
Southern Europe it is particularly high. In Central and Eastern Europe tutoring
has been popular and widespread since the fall of the iron curtain with many
students doubling up as tutoring themselves. While in Western Europe the scale
of tutoring greatly increased during the last decade, the Nordic Member States
appear to be the least affected by the phenomenon so far.
The global tutoring market
will surpass the $152 billion mark in 2015, according to market research firm
Global Industry Analysts Inc. The surge is mainly due to the rise of educational
enrichment businesses in Asia particularly Asia-Pacific
Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and China. In South Korea alone it was projected to
reach $13.9 billion in 2012 that is roughly
15% of the entire market Growth in the U.S. is
nowhere near that level. But last year the federal government invested $134
million into these businesses under the No Child Left Behind Act, Tutoring
services vary from offering
in-house trained tutors, to a commission-based and finally subscription-based
platforms.
One platform that is based on the latter
model and is disrupting the tutoring landscape is Meetnlearn. By providing direct
access to tutors that are often difficult to find in classifieds, the platform
supports connections between students and tutors in a range of subjects and
discipline.
Cost
Effectiveness
It cuts costs for both parents and tutors. Meetnlearn provides a central meeting
place in a fragmented landscape. This
provides greater support, on the one hand for busy parents who are often
overstretched, over-worked and underpaid-- the service is free for
parents—furthermore it can be very time
consuming for parents to find reliable teacher. On the other hand tutors struggle to find the time to manage
all their students. Tutoring platforms
such as Meetnlearn offer ease and accessibility, consolidating and managing
their students in one central platform.
More
Tutoring Time = More Valuable Lessons
Oliver Korbas, a university student, was one
of the first teachers on the Meetnlearn
platform. He had some experience but he had to manage all the work himself,
until he started using Meetnlearn.
Thanks to this service he was able to scale up by gaining 21 students
and monetize by running his tutoring service more efficiently, earning €800 per
month charging about €12 an hour. Meetnlearn
platform kept him more efficient and organized and he was able focus more
closely on bringing value into his lessons for his students
Finding
the Right Fit
A student in UK who was struggling to be the
best in her class in mathematics, was in the top set, but near the bottom of
the class. Her mathematics tutor is
taking her steadily through difficult concepts. Suddenly the Maths teacher gets
M.E right before her final exams. The supply
teacher begins with Russian mathematics, ignoring the syllabus, assuming
everyone in the class needs a challenge.
The girl falls behind and cannot grasp the remaining syllabus on her
own. She does not achieve the expected
grade. Deciding to retake the exam she asks her former Maths teacher to tutor
her. Within four weeks they go through the whole syllabus together and her
grades improve from a D to a B, giving her the entry she needed back into the
system. With online tutoring platforms like Meetnlearn the whole process of
meeting and reconnecting becomes easier.
With feedback from the student, she
described how, through tutoring, she was not only able to have a better and
more personal learning experience leading to better learning outcomes, but also
it gave her motivation to develop her own learning strategy and to understand
the concepts more comprehensively.
Peer
and Intergenerational Learning
Another student in Germany, was failing in
Physics and after hiring a 22 year old as a physics teacher over the Meetnlearn
platform, she increased her grade from a 6 to a 3 and remarked at how much
easier Physics had become once she was able to grasp the concepts with him in
her own time.
Despite
the 2011 report from the EU Commission discussing that it is much more about
maintaining the competitive advantages of the already successful and
privileged, cases such as those above reveal how there is a growing need to
meet with tutors in order to get back into the system that is, on a global
scale in need of reform in a variety of areas.
Instead of children falling through the gaps in the cover all public
education systems, free platforms that are free for parents like Meetnlearn are
increasingly giving easier access to engaging and energetic tutors that are
often only a few years older or one generation above the students
themselves. This kind of peer and
intergenerational learning gives young people the chance not only to pass on
their knowledge, often deepening their understanding of their subjects, but
also gives encouragement to students who often look up to their older peers,
spurring their motivation further to develop their own learning strategies and
often giving tutors the chance to improve their teaching strategies, giving way
to an mutual benefit.
How Tutoring Platforms can make the
whole process easier
Perhaps
if we can understand the tutoring landscape more comprehensively from feedback
of students and teachers who are using platforms such as Meetnlearn then we can
feed this back into the public education system to improve and support what is
already in place instead of just disregarding the whole system and instead as
seeing this shadow industry as a buttress to improvement.
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