Discussions
What is DisTTutor?
DisTTutor - from English. “distant tutor” is an Internet service that helps people quickly and without risks find professional freelance teachers and study online without leaving their home or office.
DisTTutor gives teachers the opportunity to create personal distance courses, plan work time, conduct online classes in a special “virtual office” created specifically taking into account the specifics of individual and group classes with a tutor.
What areas of work await us at DisTTutor in 2014?
Before this, the company spent a lot of time creating and developing distance learning methods, but none of the methods will work if there are no convenient technical means for online classes. That is why we focus on developing convenient services for online teachers. We also plan to improve the system of existing distance courses and bringing them to market realities.
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Alexander Pashkov - about how the TutorOnline project is developing and how you can make money in the field of online education
The TutorOnline project was invented by entrepreneurs Alexander Pashkov and Valery Solovyov: they developed a service that relieves schoolchildren of unfinished homework, a kind of “school ambulance.” The student could quickly contact the tutor via Skype to sort out the assignment. Over time, it turned out that most of the students needed something else: not one-time tips the night before the exam, but regular classes. After traveling to Silicon Valley on a program for entrepreneurs, the partners changed their concept. About how TutorOnline works, for the Five O’Clock project told one of the founders of the service, Alexander Pashkov.
34 years old, entrepreneur, co-founder of the service TutorOnline. Education: Belarusian State University(Mechmat). The online platform TutorOnline has united about 500 teachers and tutors with thousands of students in 50 countries. The service helps students quickly prepare for tests and improve their subjects before passing the Unified State Exam and GIA, as well as master the basics of programming, Photoshop and chess.
How did TutorOnline appear?
What happened before TutorOnline? The first thing we did with our partners was a web studio in Minsk. Then they opened a translation agency, which worked quite successfully until the 2008 crisis. We created an online directory of services and an aggregator. All projects brought money, and this profit was enough to launch TutorOnline at the beginning of 2011. Or we could take cars and apartments ( smiling).
300 thousand dollars were spent on creating a platform and a whiteboard - a virtual analogue of a blackboard. While we were reaching the breakeven point, we spent another couple of hundred thousand.
The first client was found the next day after opening. A girl from Sakhalin, or rather her mother, ordered our first lesson. It is difficult to say that this is our achievement. On the day of the launch of TutorOnline there was a lot of advertising, so we were counting on exactly this effect - ordering the very next day.
There were no doubts about the demand; on the contrary, we were afraid not to satisfy it. I remember that almost immediately they set up a call center and invited many teachers and curators. In reality, everything turned out to be, to put it mildly, not so. The demand was much less than we expected, but we already had 30 teachers in the database, with six on staff. This was our first experience with the market.
How the team was assembled
Many teachers liked our selection system; Just by looking at it, it was clear that we were doing a serious project. There was no well-known online English school SkyEng yet; there was nothing to compare us with, which is both good and bad.
Before us, there were simply catalogs of tutors: here is the person, here are his contacts, here are the subjects he teaches. However, there are no guarantees: you went to them at your own peril and risk.
And we had a selection: we took three or four people out of a hundred. And these were the best of the best. Plus, we offered completely market salaries, even higher. Let's see how much it costs good teacher, and they invited people for exactly that kind of money.
The selection went like this: first the candidate must provide everything Required documents, confirming education, work experience, qualifications. Then he undergoes a test session, testing in his subject, to demonstrate current level knowledge. And finally, a series of interviews with me and TutorOnline specialists. At this stage, they are already checking, so to speak, human qualities, and not just professional ones: how sociable a person is, open, ready to communicate with children and motivated.
Now approximately a quarter of TutorOnline clients are from Moscow. Half are from Russian regions. And another quarter are from other countries. In Russia, orders come after Moscow from St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. And behind them are oil cities: Nefteyugansk, Surgut, etc.
And one more thing about the team. You need to take on the team the smartest people, people with high intelligence. They must have good ones analytic skills And good feeling humor. Finally, they must understand that the team's goals are always higher than theirs. personal plans on self-realization.
Our teachers have average salaries for the offline tutor market. There are those who work at full capacity, full time, and earn up to 80,000 rubles. In general, if the teacher good experience, high rating and a lot of orders, then he definitely gets more than an ordinary school teacher.
Unified State Exam as a driver of demand
We started with mathematics, Russian and English languages. These are the most popular positions; as long as the Unified State Exam exists, this list will not change.
At the start, we offered free first lessons and told them that this format of training is much more convenient than the traditional one. In fact, almost nothing worked. We are a little ahead of time, and “timing,” as we were taught in Silicon Valley during our internship, should always be correct. This is the main thing I took away from there. If it’s late, then the market is already very competitive, if it’s early, it will be very difficult for you to convey your service to the masses.
After America, we understood how to grow. We removed unnecessary expenses, processes, people, advertising. We began to delve more into the details of the project and ask ourselves awkward questions. For example, why are we trying to attract people who are simply looking for a tutor - it doesn’t matter which one, the main thing is cheap and convenient in time?
In Moscow you can talk about our advantages - there are traffic jams and other prices, but in small cities the benefit for the client is conditional. This means that we need to attract those for whom online will be a really convenient format, and not because it is modern. They have a different regime, different values, a different standard of living. We focused on Moscow and oil cities like Surgut. There are good prices and an understanding of what exactly we offer. IN last years There are also orders from Russian-speaking families around the world. There are not many of them, but there is a stable demand.
From one-time assistance to regular lessons
At first we promoted TutorOnline as an “educational ambulance”, a platform for immediate solutions school tasks, but then they focused on regular classes with a tutor.
“ER” is a purely American format, and at first we were very excited about it. Almost everything was copied to scratch from the Tutor.com service with minimal adaptation, but we quickly realized that the template did not work. We began to analyze what people want and look at how they use the service. It turned out that only 5% of students are interested in “ ambulance” when they just need help solving problems. This is a one-time need: if you don’t cope, we help, you leave the resource. The remaining 95% wanted to exercise regularly. It's not easy to solve one specific task, but to learn how to solve such types of problems, and generally improve the subject.
On average, one lesson from the TutorOnline service costs 550 rubles. On average, one student buys 30 lessons and brings in 16,500 rubles in revenue.
There are still requests for one-time assistance; we have not abandoned this service. It's just not the main service; the focus is on tutoring. However, the time will come for the ambulance, the clients will catch up; those who have tried it praise it. It’s convenient: I knocked on the teacher’s door at 22:00, figured it out in half an hour and solved everything. Moreover, I decided on my own; we forbid teachers from giving students a completely ready-made solution.
Our main client is mothers 35-45 years old. For them, online learning is still new, they need time to adjust, but things are changing quickly. Previously, an order could be disrupted due to the fact that people forgot their email password and were unable to register on our website (which is why, by the way, we did registration via phone). In general, computer literacy is growing, and even if parents do not immediately understand something about the platform, their children help them.
At first we had Silverlight, a Microsoft thing, a plugin. Students had to download it, install it, launch it - in general, it was not very convenient. Last summer we changed everything: now you don’t have to download anything, but just study right away. The platform has become much more convenient and simpler.
Most often we work with students in grades 9-11, but the kids in grades 5-6 bring in the most money. They study much longer. Although sometimes one student spends about the same in their senior year as a high school student spends in three.
It is more profitable to hire tutors in the regions
We had tutors from Moscow, but they were not satisfied with the fees quickly enough. But people from the Moscow region are willing to work for this money; prices there are reasonable. The city, in fact, is not so important: if it is a St. Petersburg snob, bad subject knowledgeable, or a grandfather from Tomsk who knows everything inside and out, then we, of course, are for the second option.
The city is most important local level income. In any case, it is more profitable for us to hire a person in the province: less requirements, less pay, easier to replace. But it is also more profitable for the client to deal with a teacher from Tomsk rather than from St. Petersburg. You will pay him less.
Since 2011, 8,556 students have completed training at the TutorOnline online school.
"Left" lessons? Is not a big problem. We encounter it when it comes to lessons. foreign language, where, in principle, one Skype is enough. But mathematics, Russian, chemistry, physics - they definitely need a whiteboard. You need to draw all these graphs and write formulas somewhere. Over the course of five years, we had only a few cases of “left-wing” lessons. What is more important here is not the security of the system, but the added value of your product, so that a person understands that with you he will earn more than without you.
To understand that “inappropriate” lessons have begun, you need to pay attention to the fact that, say, out of ten students, the tutor has three left. Moreover, there were no complaints against him. And the other had ten - and ten remained. Why such difference? This means that either the person still teaches poorly, or he does not teach directly. In any case, we exclude it from our database. Control technologies in different areas are similar, the main thing is to analyze the behavior of the tutor and monitor the quality of his lessons.
Marketing and promotion
After five years of working on the project, I can say that the most effective marketing is the product itself. Give people something they can't get elsewhere and they will come to you. This 100% works. As soon as we start being stricter with tutors at the entrance to the project, people see the difference and stay with us longer. Of course, the sundress works. If we talk about advertising, then this is SEO, context. We tried distributing leaflets, speaking at conferences - it was all pointless. So get better at the product.
The markets for online learning and traditional school tutoring are different markets. They are designed differently, one only folds, and the second is known to everyone. Offline competition is stronger, the market is saturated there, but in fact we are forced to compete on two fronts at once. And the main thing now is to show that you are not only faster and more profitable than offline, but also more efficient. Due to what? Due to whiteboards, interactive lessons, new technologies.
If you look at the American market, you can guess what will happen next: offline schools will go online. In the USA, all offline monsters create their own services, go online, and create projects. Most likely, we will have the same thing. True, much later.
The online learning market promises to be very large, even if it is segmented. For example, we introduced chess and the basics of Photoshop - everyone liked it, they are in demand. I don't even know what won't go online. Well, maybe a massage for infants. And everything else - don’t even doubt it.
I have been working at dist-tutor.info for 3.5 years. I like that the managers ask the students who apply in great detail about why they need a tutor, what the current level of the student is, how many lessons are planned, at what time, etc. This helps you better understand whether you should to this tutor take this particular order. I would like there to be further clarification in such detail...
Maybe, high commissions. However, they pay off.
04.08.14 22:09 BryanskGalina Soboleva,
Qualified company employees are always ready to help and provide moral and technical support. My deepest bow to you for a company that can enable a teacher to fully realize his or her Creative skills, teach and learn yourself. This is happiness for a teacher who loves his job!
The only confusing thing is the information about failed orders, which affects the teacher’s rating. After all, these orders did not take place through no fault of his.
17.06.14 19:50 Yekaterinburg cityGalina Valentinovna...,
1) Attentive and respectful attitude towards teachers; 2) skillful selection of clients by managers, taking into account individual characteristics teacher and possible compatibility with the student; 3) excellent development of the platform and its constant improvement; 4) the ability to create your own courses: 5) transparency of the administration; 6) and much more...
on this moment- No.
17.06.14 12:59 VolgogradSvetlana Anatolyevna...,
All conditions have been created for productive work: work from home in convenient time, decent salary, constant opportunity for self-improvement, the opportunity to receive qualified help from colleagues and the Administration at any time.
I don't see it yet.
11.06.14 13:00 AltaiRaisa Klimova,
This work gave me the opportunity to prove myself in a new capacity - a distance tutor, to master new ways of working for me related to modern technologies and significantly expand your circle of contacts. This is a job that makes me the mistress of my time! Great site! For which many thanks to its leaders and creators! I would like to note not only the high professionalism...
I don't see it yet.
10.06.14 21:39 Krasnodar cityNadezhda Tokareva,
The company provides remote work. Managers Veronica and Olga quickly and skillfully select a tutor for the client, taking into account individual approach. The company employs highly qualified tutors, whose qualifications are confirmed by documents, and teachers have also been certified. The team is friendly, where help and mutual assistance are provided. The company has created its own convenient platform...
I don't see them
10.06.14 20:50 AltaiElena Dronova,
I turned to DistTuter because I wanted to get new sensations by testing myself in new role– the role of a distance tutor. Now tutoring has become a favorite thing for me. I was convinced that the company employs friendly, responsible managers who are ready to help at the first call. They provide consultations almost around the clock. The site has amazingly inviting communication...
I can't find it yet!
10.06.14 20:02 Yekaterinburg cityLarisa Sabirova,
I'm glad that there is such a company that gave me the opportunity to work from home (I have Small child). I make my own schedule. Students are constantly being offered, so you won’t be left without work. Convenient website, blackboard for working with students. The administration and managers of the company respond in a timely manner.
Many Russian schoolchildren already convinced own experience: studying remotely is convenient, profitable and interesting. About the features remote form training we asked to tell Anna Vladimirovna Osankina, online Russian language tutor.
A. V. Osankina, online Russian language tutor
I started distance learning for schoolchildren about five years ago, when the company was formed Dist-tutor– an Internet service for those who want to study remotely. Here I would like to talk about the pros and cons of distance learning that I have seen during my work.
pros
I won’t talk about saving time on travel and parents’ nerves. I will talk about how classes with a distance tutor go.
Anatomy of a remote lesson
I taught my first lessons via Skype using a whiteboard IDroo. Over time, our company’s programmers created a special platform for distance learning - DistTutor Virtual Classroom, it turned out to be much more convenient than Idroo. The student and I see each other on the screen and communicate as usual, face-to-face class. The great advantage of the platform is interactive board: What the student writes on the board is synchronously displayed on my screen - this allows me to constantly monitor the student, which is not always possible in a face-to-face lesson. And vice versa: what I write, the student immediately sees, that is, the lesson takes place as in a regular class, only individually and at home.
After class, I send a screenshot of the board so that the child can better understand everything we covered. By the way, in face-to-face lessons I always missed the banal school board- this is a significant disadvantage full-time training, at least to the Russian language.
On the platform, except for the tool Text, with which you can type texts, there is Pencil– they can write by hand using a graphics tablet, although it is not at all necessary to buy one: many students do Russian language analysis with a regular mouse. Very convenient tool Line, which allows you to underline with one click - there is a wavy line, a dotted line, a dot-dash.
You can upload to the board Various types files – presentations, pictures, text files, videos, etc., which helps improve the student’s perception of the material and diversifies the lesson.
This is interesting!
Modern children, who grew up in front of a computer, are learning with interest information Technology. When we switched to new platform, the guys were delighted!
Of course, there are many platforms for learning now. But the advantage of our platform is that every tutor has the opportunity to contact the developers. If a student is uncomfortable doing something on the board, I write to the programmers about it, and they correct the problem.
Checking homework
Another advantage of distance learning is that the student can send me homework before the start of the next lesson. I load the completed exercise onto the board, and we begin the lesson by analyzing it, repeating the material covered along the way - in this case, the child, as a rule, finds his own mistakes.
Lesson on a tablet? Why not?
This fact also speaks in favor of distance learning. One of my students, Maxim, wanted to study from a tablet, although he also had a computer. Now our programmers are preparing a version of the platform for Android, but last year it did not exist yet. I had to teach lessons via Skype - I wanted the student to feel comfortable. Classes were conducted via instant messaging and screen sharing. Maxim passed the State Examination Test with a “4”.
Minuses
I think the only disadvantage of distance learning is poor quality sound. It happens that the student and I seem to hear each other quite well, but at the same time there is strong background noise. In such cases, I refuse classes - I don’t want to waste the student’s time and discredit distance learning. But I had few such students. So before you turn to remote tutor, I advise you to check the quality of your Skype connection with your friends.
Learning for the future
Thus, distance learning, like everything new, has pros and cons, but, from my point of view, there are much more advantages. Five years ago, I completely abandoned face-to-face tutoring in favor of distance tutoring, despite the lower cost of lessons, as I see its clear advantages. Of course, everything new causes distrust: as Kabanikha from A. N. Ostrovsky’s play “The Thunderstorm” said about the newly appeared trains, “even if you shower me with gold, I won’t go.” And I am sure that over time, distance tutoring will completely replace face-to-face tutoring.
If you have any questions, you can ask me by contacting the company Dist-tutor or to our VKontakte group:
Dear teachers! We invite you to methodological webinars that will be held in the near future. The promotion “Three webinars for 1000 rubles” is valid for all three webinars. All those who attended the webinars will have their profile rating increased.
A 2-3 hour webinar will take place on Wednesday 08/17/2016 at 13:00 MSK - round table"Motivation in online learning."
http://dist-tutor.info/request/add.php
Webinar plan:
1. Introduction
2. The concept of motivation
3. Discussion "Motivation or stimulation"?
4. Concept of stimulation
5. Motivational cycle
6. Types of motivation
7. Content theories of motivation (Maslow, Alderfer, McClelland, Herzberg’s two-factor theory)
8. Process theories motivation (Vroom's expectancy theory, Adams' theory of justice, complex theory Porter-Lawler motivation).
9. Discussion “The most important motivator is the Personality of the Teacher”?
10. McGregor's Theory X and Y.
11. Yerkes-Dodson law.
12. L.S. Vygotsky about motivation.
13. The phenomenon of “cognitive dissonance”.
14. Problem-based learning in creating conditions for motivation.
15. How to achieve educational motivation? Basic principles and rules
16. The structure of motives for studying.
17. The structure of motives in online learning.
18. Emotions and motivation Webinar presenter: Vladimir Kuzmin, co-founder of DisTTutor
If someone is unable to take part in the webinar, they can order a video recording and other materials.
On Thursday 08/18/2016 at 13:00 MSK there will be a repeat of the webinar “Methodology and practice in working as an online tutor”
We will try to answer the questions:
1. How not to lose a student after being assigned to an order?
2. How not to lose a student early training?
3. Is it necessary to take all students in a row?
4. Features of online learning methods, do they exist, what are they?
5. Logic or emotions, IQ or EQ, what is more important in the work of an online tutor?
6. How can you get more students to enroll in your classes?
and much more...
You can sign up for the webinar in advance from the page http://dist-tutor.info/request/add.php, indicating the topic of the webinar. The Company manager will contact you and explain the terms of payment and participation.
Webinar presenter: co-founder of DisTTutor Vladimir Kuzmin
On Friday, August 19, 2016 at 13:00 MSK, a webinar “First lesson. How to prepare and conduct it” will be held.
1. Should the first lesson be free?
2. How to organize the first lesson?
3. Parents at the first lesson. Harm or benefit?
4. What should you never say in your first lesson?
5. What to do in the first lesson?
6. The first lesson as a means to reduce risks for the tutor. and much more. You can sign up for the webinar in advance from the page http://dist-tutor.info/request/add.php, indicating the topic of the webinar. The Company manager will contact you and explain the terms of payment and participation. Webinar presenter: co-founder of DisTTutor Vladimir Kuzmin