Introduction

The demand for online learning has surged in recent years and is projected to grow significantly by 2030 [1]. Digital tutoring has emerged as a highly effective alternative to traditional face-to-face or textbook methods, offering tutoring businesses a unique opportunity to deliver scalable, accessible, high-quality learning experiences.

Whether you're starting a tutoring business to fill a gap in the market or you’re an established tutoring business looking to scale, this blog will guide you through essential strategies to grow your tutoring business.

What are the benefits of online tutoring?

Online learning has transformed the way students learn and tutors teach, offering a range of benefits that enhance convenience, efficiency, and effectiveness for everyone. Here are some key advantages:

• Saves time: Features such as automated grading and instant feedback streamline assessment processes, allowing tutors to focus more on teaching rather than administrative tasks.
• Flexibility: Online assessment platforms enable students to access content from anywhere, eliminating travel requirements and providing a more convenient experience for families.
• Reduced manual work for tutors: Automatically graded question types and instant reporting significantly reduce the manual workload, addressing a common frustration among tutors.
• Automations: With features such as automatic re-attempt settings and automatic tailoring of questions to individual needs, an online assessment software simplifies tutoring workflows and improve learning outcomes.
• In-depth analytics: An online assessment software provides detailed analytics that track student engagement, performance, and progress over time, enabling tutors to identify areas where students need additional support. These insights allow for data-driven decisions to enhance teaching strategies and personalise learning experiences.
• Easier check out process: Integrating eCommerce tools ensures students get instant access to content upon payment, creating a smoother and more efficient process for students and parents.
• Scale nationally or internationally: Digital platforms remove geographic barriers, allowing tutoring businesses to expand their reach and grow their business globally.

What can you deliver online as a tutoring business?

Moving online opens up a wealth of opportunities to deliver diverse and engaging educational experiences. Here’s what you can offer to your students:

• Question banks: Offer extensive question banks that students can use to practice and refine their understanding, tailored by their subject, topic, or difficulty level preferences for personalised learning experiences.
• Mock exams & practice tests: Create realistic exams with timed conditions and use exam tools such as highlighters and notepads, to help students gain confidence in a simulated exam environment.
• Diagnostic tests: Provide diagnostic tests to assess students' initial knowledge and identify strengths and weaknesses, to tailor their learning experience or see how they improve from engaging with courses.
• Courses: Deliver interactive courses featuring videos, audio, presentations, and quizzes to build a comprehensive understanding of subjects.

Key features of an effective online tutoring platform

1. Create engaging question banks

You may have questions written from your previous studies (such as on flash cards or Word Docs), existing questions for your tutoring business in the form of PDF past papers, or they may be in an online system. In other words, your questions could be scattered across various places!

By using an online assessment software, you can centralise all your questions and future question development.

When developing questions for your tutoring business, it’s beneficial to consider the advantages of creating them directly within your chosen platform. Additionally, for a large number of questions, exploring the most efficient methods for importing existing content can save valuable time.

1. Creating questions: Using question authoring tools within an online assessment software is excellent for crafting your questions, as these tools aid in quality assurance. If you already have your question content written in a PDF or Word format, they can simply be copied and pasted into a question builder.
2. Automated question types: Traditional paper-based exams have limitations with question types, for example drag-and-drop and dropdown do not translate to paper, and all questions require manual scoring. Online assessment platforms offer a greater variety of questions types that can also be automatically graded. This significantly reduces your workload and save you valuable time.
3. Bulk uploading: If your questions are written in a spreadsheet or in an existing online testing software that can exported via CSV, then it's beneficial to check if the new online assessment platform supports CSV bulk upload capabilities. This majorly simplifies the process, enabling you to easily upload thousands of questions at once.
4. Provide feedback: Instant feedback via an online exam platform helps students quickly address mistakes and reinforce learning in real time, with options to link to resources and include video explanations. For tutors, it streamlines the feedback process, saving time and enabling more targeted support.

”I find that the information provided as feedback when completing the questions is very easy to understand and manageable. The fact that it explains each of the answers separately is incredibly useful.” - Adam, medical student. Read the case study.

5. Question organisation: Harnessing the power of an online assessment system can greatly improve your question management. It allows you to efficiently build and grow your question bank and categorise questions with tags, such as topic or difficulty levels, enhancing both organisation and efficiency.

6. Flagging for QA: The ability to add flags to your questions allow you to review and quality assure your questions in the early stages. It also facilitates collaboration, allowing colleagues to work together on improving question content.

2. Setting up mock exams, practice tests and question banks

An online exam platform provides a valuable opportunity to enhance your tutoring services by allowing you to create and deliver simulated mock exams.

These practice tests not only help students become familiar with the exam format but also enable them to practice under realistic conditions, thereby improving their confidence and performance. By integrating these simulations into your tutoring programme, you can offer a more comprehensive and effective learning experience.

1. Exam simulation: You can add time limits to your exam to simulate the actual time constraints students will face during the real test, ensuring they practice time management skills. Additionally, enabling exam tools such as a calculator, notepad and highlighter, helps replicate their real-life exam experience, making the practice sessions as authentic as possible.
2. Re-take exams: Flexible re-attempt options, such as limiting retake attempts, retakes until passing, or offering unlimited attempts, empower students to practice and track their improvement over time. For your tutoring business, these options can align with your objectives, such as offering a set number of attempts as part of a purchased package or monetising additional retakes, creating a balance between student progress and business goals.
3. Question banks: Using an online assessment platform gives you the opportunity to allow students to generate their own attempts from a large question bank. Students can choose categories of questions, based on the tag (such as topic or difficulty) or their mastery level. This approach promotes personalised learning and enhances student satisfaction.

“I can take pre-made tests and make my own for very specific topic areas which is very useful in consolidating my knowledge.” - Eden, medical student. Read the case study.

3. Instant grading and reporting

Traditional tutoring methods involve significant manual tasks such as grading exams, generating reports, and consolidating data for decision-making. Online tutoring can leverage automation to streamline these processes, saving your tutors valuable time to focus on other elements of teaching.

1. Automated grading: The benefits of online assessment systems is that they offer various automatically graded question formats, such as multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and short written answers. This can save you countless hours of manual scoring, allowing you to focus on high-quality tutoring and personalised student support.
2. Automated reporting: Delays between test completion, grading, and students receiving results can be a significant problem for traditional tutoring methods. These delays hinder timely feedback, crucial for students to understand their progress and areas needing improvement. Using a an online testing system with automatic reporting can address these delays, as students can gather immediate insight into their areas of strengths and weaknesses, and take charge of their own learning.
3. Feedback: Students waiting for feedback can be an issue for in-person tutoring methods as it delays their progress in learning. Using an online assessment platform can enhance learning progress with instant feedback. Provide automated explanations to questions and address misconceptions in real-time, link to course content to advance learning, and embed videos to guide students toward improvement.

4. Security and intellectual property

Safeguarding your intellectual property from competitors and preventing students from cheating are critical aspects to uphold integrity and credibility of your business.

1. **Anti-cheat features:** Protecting your questions from unauthorised distribution is crucial to maintain the integrity of your tutoring business. Consider choosing an online assessment tool with strong anti-cheating methods, such as preventing copying and pasting, that can stop your questions from being leaked online.
2. Water marks: Adding your logo to your questions not only adds a professional touch, but also enhances security by adding an extra layer of protection against online leaks. This branding helps to clearly identify your content and discourages unauthorised sharing or distribution.
3. Intellectual property: After investing time and effort to create your own content, it is essential to choose an online assessment software with clear terms and conditions stating it will not own, use or resell your content. This will protect your intellectual property from potential misuse.

“As an education company, Synap has been an extremely helpful tool for not only our internal team but also for students around the world. Many of our students have benefit greatly from Synap.“ - Hamzah B, CEO, StudyHat. Read the case study.

5. Getting ready to launch

Whether you are just starting out your tutoring journey or switching from another system, it is beneficial to begin with a small, manageable number of students and content and gradually expand. You don’t need 1,000’s of questions to begin, you could start with a small number, such as 100, and grow your content overtime.

This allows you to gather valuable feedback from students as early as possible, so you can continuously iterate and improve your content and services.

1. Internally test the process: It is important to thoroughly test the entire process to identify any discrepancies or issues before launching live with students. Inviting a colleague to test it out is a great way to get an additional perspective to identify issues more efficiently, leading to quicker resolutions.
2. Inviting a pilot group: Consider adopting a phased approach after setting up and internally testing your online assessment software, by inviting a small pilot group to participate. This method ensures a more thorough testing phase, ensuring a successful larger roll out.
3. Branding: With other tutoring companies out there, establishing a strong brand is crucial to set your online offering apart from the competition, and builds trust with potential customers. A clear, consistent brand makes it easier for parents and students to connect with and choose your services.

Using a an online assessment software that allows you to add your own branding, including adding your logo and colour scheme, with white-labelling options, such as a custom domain, is a big plus. A well-defined brand fosters loyalty and can turn satisfied clients into advocates, helping to grow your reputation and business through word-of-mouth and positive reviews.

6. Launching live with students

When going live with your students, it's beneficial to explore methods for gathering insights into how the launch is performing.

1. Track engagement and progress: Online assessment tools empower you to track students' engagement with your content and closely monitor their progress. This data not only reveals patterns in student behaviour but also highlights areas where additional support may be beneficial. By leveraging these insights, you can proactively reach out to students who may need extra guidance by recommending other courses, packages or services that you offer.
2. Respond to question flags to improve questions quality: One of the significant advantages of online tutoring tools is the ability to enhance question quality effectively. With features such as question flagging, students can promptly notify you about any inaccuracies in your questions, allowing you to make swift corrections and improvements.
3. Ask for feedback and testimonials: Utilising authoring tools, such as surveys, often offered by an online assessment system allows you to gather student feedback on your content. Additionally, collecting testimonials through these tools can amplify your website's credibility and attract a broader customer base. This strategy helps scale your offering and attract more students by enhancing credibility and showcasing the quality of your tutoring services.

7. Scaling to a wider customer base

Embracing an online assessment platform allows you to scale your tutoring business and reach a broader audience. By leveraging digital tools and systems, you can cater to a great number of students from various locations, and increase your capacity without the constraints of physical space or taking on additional staff.

This scalability not only boosts your revenue potential but also enhances your ability to provide personalised, high-quality education to a diverse range of learners.

1. eCommerce tools: This is invaluable for scaling your online tutoring business by automating processes such as payments and instant content delivery, which reduces administrative work. With instant access, students can begin learning immediately without waiting. This efficiency not only allows you to generate income effortlessly, even while you sleep, but also enhances your business’s scalability and customer appeal.
2. White-labelling: This empower you to strip away the platform's identity and showcase the solution as if it is your own solution, helping you to stand out from competitors. By utilising a custom domain, which allows your online assessment software to be integrated with your website, this offers a bespoke service in a competitive market.
3. Connect your tools: Centralising your data is convenient, and leveraging APIs and tools like Zapier, can automate workflows and maintain seamless connectivity. For instance, if you use a CRM such as HubSpot or SalesForce, you might automate the transfer of the students’ result data from your online assessment system, ensuring all your data remains up-to-date.
4. Courses: Incorporating diverse learning content into your offering such as videos, audio recordings, presentations, and interactive quizzes, you can enhance the learning environment and provide knowledge and theoretical concepts to your students.
5. Spaced Learning: It's worthwhile exploring an online exam platform that offer additional features to outperform competitors, adapts to the learner’s needs, and maximise learning potential for your students. Synap’s Spaced learning algorithm tracks how students are performing when taking practice questions. It then automatically generates bite-sized daily quizzes showing questions that they most need to practice at the right intervals, to improve students long term knowledge retention.

“Features on the platform allow students to tailor the questions they need to improve on and improve their overall score. Their spaced repetition algorithm also helps highlight areas students need to improve.” Read the case study.

Scale your tutoring business with Synap today

Explore how Synap’s assessment features helps make delivering online tutoring easy, with a tailored demo and 14-day free trial.

References

1. Hamilton-Stubber T. (2024) Tutor Cruncher, Online Tutoring Trends and Predictions for 2024, https://tutorcruncher.com/online-tutoring-trends