My Online Tutoring Website

[Daniel Ling]

Hi all,

I have just created my first online tutoring website. I welcome anyone to visit the site and give me their opinion of the site. Can be anything from the rates, subjects, the virtual whiteboard, or even the website design. Thank you.

Website: http://www.mathphysicsonline.com

regards
Daniel

[Scott Palat]

It's a great start for sure.

These are my tips:

1. Put your picture and 800# or skype number on the front page.
2. Include a demo of an online tutoring classroom. You can use www.TutorFi.com/demo.asf if you wish.
3. Remove those images on your index. They look weird on my screen. They are covering up your words.
4. Offer a free phone consultation on your website
5. Download my report on the right side to get the rest of the details.

Glad to see you took the initiative to get started with your online tutoring business.

Good job!

[Christian Stapfer]

To produce a demo video of a tutoring session for free you might use a free 30 day trial version of Camtasia Studio 6. Another free alternative is Wink, but I am told that audio quality of Wink generated videos is not great...

Also, I am not particularly impressed with your whiteboard. What alternatives have you considered?

[Daniel Ling]

Hi,

Thank you for your advice.

I chose the GroupBoard because of its simplicity, user-friendliness, cost-effectiveness and ease of integration into my website. I have considered Vyew.com but I found the application abit too complicated. Although the features of the whiteboard are important, what I think will impress the student should be how I teach, not how the whiteboard have or look like. As long as it is simple enough for the student to use, and it meets the basic needs of an online tutoring session, that should be enough for me. Do you have any better recommendation? =-)

[Scott Palat]

You are correct Daniel! It's how you teach and not necessarily how many features your whiteboard has. Most whiteboards allow you to draw, type and color code things. That's really all you need.

The shape tools are nice when it comes to being efficient, but as far as the actually tutoring goes, almost any whiteboard will work. Your #1 concern should be the voice and setting it up to work properly.

I have a list of online tutoring whiteboard reviews in my free report on the right side. I go through the pros and cons of many including vyew.com.

[Christian Stapfer]

I don't know GroupBoard, therefore I have to guess about its functionality from what I can see on your website (I also had a quick look at www.groupboard.com, but didn't learn that much from it.)
So guessing from what I can see on your website I believe that you can put only about three lines of very short formulas into that whiteboard: and that's about it. (At least that's how I, as a student looking for an online tutor, would interpret what I can see.) Also, because this is a whiteboard that is integrated into your website, and therefore has to run inside a browser, you cannot use the clipboard to quickly transfer information from other apps, like a computer algebra program, that might also be running on your machine, and that just might be great for very quickly producing some really instructive graphics to illustrate some point you are trying to make. It might even be impossible for you to insert an image into that whiteboard at all! (Taking the whiteboard contents that I have saved from one of my own tutoring sessions at random I can say that within a single hour I have written 4 pages A4 that contain 13 raster images that I pasted in from the clipboard. Those 13 images were either from scans of exercise sheets that the student mailed me just before the tutoring session, from a textbook, from a formulary, from a CAS system, or from an archive of prefabricated math illustrations. If I didn't have that possibility, to quickly transfer images into the whiteboard, my tutoring efforts would be seriously cramped, I believe.)
Of course, I agree that your qualities as a tutor are the most important part of successful online tutoring. But inadequate, clumsy tools just might bog down the efforts of even the most talented tutor...
It might be that there is no better whiteboard that you could integrate into your website. As for the much broader category of browser based ones, there are some that at least allow you to insert images into the whiteboard and move them around, like scribblar. (Images must be transferred to a scribblar whiteboard in a clumsy way however, i.e. through the file system and a file selection dialog box.)

[Scott Palat]

I do agree with one thing for sure, inserting images would be a nice feature to have inside any online classroom. Some of the other things you are referring to, I don't quite understand, but it sounds like it would be beneficial for my TutorFi clients. I'll check out those other options.

[Scott Palat]

I love Camtasia for screen recordings.

The whiteboard we use for TutorFi works well and has all the tools that most traditional whiteboards have. I haven't considered any others at this point, but am considering adding a few more features including a graph tool. I will say that our voice works perfectly, where as some of the others online whiteboards don't work so well.

What recommendations do you have? The majority of our tutors love our whiteboard and use it for online tutoring on a daily basis. The only recommended upgrade I've consistently heard of is the graph tool, but for now they can copy and paste a graph in or draw it. Keep in mind that most of our clients tutor K-12 and not on a college level. I know there are many more tools that would be useful for college level courses.

We also use google docs to collaborate and share files. Google docs is a wonderful tool on its own.

[Christian Stapfer]

What recommendations do I have? - It depends. If you can paste raster images from the clipboard into the whiteboard then having graphing integrated into the whiteboard does not seem necessary to me. (An earlier, Java2 based version of my own whiteboard had a graph tool which, at that time, seemed very important to me. However, after I had written a new C# based whiteboard, but had not had the time to write another graph tool for the first version of it, I found that copy and paste of raster images from a Computer Algebra System was (almost) as good - and in some cases even better than a graphing tool that's integrated into the whiteboard.) So I agree that a graphing tool is not that important, provided you can paste raster images from the clipboard into the whiteboard - which is not the case for whiteboards that are running in a browser ("browser based whiteboards").
If you have a tablet-pc you might be disappointed by the coarse ink you get if you haven't managed to acquire a whiteboard that knows how to handle pen strokes on a tablet-pc. In his thesis, Chad E. Peiper tells the history of the evolution of tablet-pc aware whiteboards at MIT. One of these whiteboards is even available for download on the net. (I cannot judge the usefulness of that download for online tutors, however. Also, there might be restrictions to its use in a commercial setting.)
It may be useful to have VoIP and chat integrated right into the whiteboard, but then: requiring integration of these three components into a single application limits your choices. Also, often such integration means that valuable space on the screen is taken up by VoIP and chat that could more profitably be invested into the surface area of the whiteboard (where, in my case at least, almost all of the real action is going on). Personally, I prefer a "tools approach" (i.e. having a combination of tools that do one, and only one job - and do it well) – where possible (and some bricolage of my own, otherwise). Such bricolage seemed necessary, for example, in order to have animations and 3d models.

[Daniel Ling]

Hi Christian and Scott.

Thank you for your valuable opinions and advices. Christian had pointed out a very important point about GroupBoard. That is, the Groupboard does limit the amount of things that I can write on it. However, the version you see is probably the freeware version. The paid version seems to have a customizable size of the whiteboard, but still, it does not cater to writting several pages of words or pasting of pictures, I guess. That is the reason when I asked if you have any better recommendation. Do you write your own Java program to create your whiteboard? I can't do that because I am no expert in Java programming.

Regarding to VoIP, Groupboard does have VoIP. The free version does not have it, but the paid version do, with additional $50 per year.

Right now, I am contemplating to use Scott's TutorFi program. But, can I clarify a few issues with Scott.

1) Is the cost of $199 a one time fee payment for life time membership?
2) Can I integrate the virtual whiteboard into my website? Or do I need to provide a link from my website to your site?
3) Does the whiteboard come with VoIP, and can I paste pictures on it? Am I able to create multiple pages and save them for the student?

To Christian,
I am looking for math and physics sample notes and homework assignments that the students in the United States receive. Do you have any links to any websites with the relevant materials?

Many thanks.

regards,

Daniel

[Christian Stapfer]

I did write my own Java2 based whiteboard back in 2002. The main reason being that the whiteboard that was part of Microsoft's NetMeeting was terribly slow, especially when asked to transmit raster images (Microsoft had decided to transmit images as uncompressed 32 bit RGB - which I can only interpret as a deliberate attempt to limit the usefulness of NetMeeting for serious collaboration over the net). That Java2 based whiteboard would run on all relevant platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac). But because writing with an external tablet was rather unnatural and quite tiresome, I finally acquired a tablet-pc and found that, unfortunately, one cannot get decent pen input with a Java2 program on a tablet-pc. So in order to fully support the much superior quality of handwriting one gets with a tablet-pc, I wrote yet another whiteboard, this time in C# (for a short demo of the basic capabilities see here).
However, it might be possible to use Microsoft's OneNote to get a decent, tablet-pc aware whiteboard without having to do any programming at all. In my case, using OneNote was not an option, because I wanted the whiteboard to be freely available to my students. Also, I wanted some features that I did not know how to add to OneNote, like animations and 3d models.
If I were you I would certainly not pay for VoIP. Just use Skype: there is no need to have VoIP integrated with the whiteboard. In my experience, which is quite extensive now (I have done several thousand hours of online tutoring in the last 7 years), Skype works great (although I must add that there are people who currently threaten to kill it in the court room - well if that happened, I would probably switch to Google Talk).
It is relatively easy to find lecture notes and homework assignments for college and university level courses (some obvious examples are MIT OpenCourseWare, document sharing sites for students, and lecture note exchanges like UC Berkeley Lecture Notes). I don’t know much about where to get access to high school level notes and assignments, however.

[Daniel Ling]

Hi Christian,

Thank you very much for your valuable advices. I am also having problems trying to advertise my services online. May I have your advice on this issue too?
Thank you.

regards
Daniel

[Christian Stapfer]

Scott Palat can answer this one much better than I ever could. Either read his free report or browse through his last few answers in this forum (because this particular question comes up every other day).