10+ Years of Experience With Online Instruction

“I wanted to tell you that D really loved working with Matt…

As you may recall, I was skeptical, but the online sessions really worked out well, and I did not have to drive her anywhere!

She got a 35 on the ACT, and came out of the SATs last weekend feeling great about it.”

Parent of 11th Grader
Princeton High School
October 2012

How Does Online Instruction Work?

When properly executed, online instruction is extremely effective (even for math!) and surprisingly engaging, even for students who typically struggle with attention.

However, your tutor or instructor MUST be knowledgeable about which tools to use and when. They also MUST tailor their curricula and teaching approach to take advantage of those tools.

Updated Training – To ensure that online tutoring continues to be seamless and effective for our students, we have recently updated our internal best practices and instituted mandatory re-training for all of our tutors.

How Online 1-1 Tutoring Works:

Sessions are still face-to-face and utilize a variety of online tools that are free and easy to use. Students can always try it out and see if it works for them or not (it rarely does not work).

• • We start with a quick technology intro so your student is familiar with with our tools
  • Zoom is recommended for video/audio, screensharing, and online whiteboarding to collaborate in real-time. Facetime is also popular amongst our students. While Skype was great in the past, there are now better options. Google Hangouts/Meet is also not recommended but is passable as a backup option.
  • Other tools allow us to quickly convert physical pages to a digital PDF equivalent
  • Documents are annotated in real-time
  • One bonus is that we can easily save whiteboard notes and share with the student for future reference

How Virtual Group Classes Work:

Your student will be pleasantly surprised at how well our classes transition to an online format. Something we’ve also observed is that students who don’t normally participate do so more often.

Our online classrooms use many of the same tools as our online private tutoring. However, we do incorporate additional capabilities to increase engagement, including:

• • Ability for participants to “raise hands”
  • Ability to “spotlight” certain students to ask or answer questions
  • Real-time polling to anonymously assess student understanding
  • Small group breakouts
  • Public and private chats

The format of live classes consist of:

• • Lectures
  • Screen-sharing of relevant materials
  • Working on sample problems together w/ real-time annotations and highlighting
  • Working through sample problems independently and “polling” answers in the online classroom
  • Calling on students to explain/present
  • Organizing students into small groups to collaborate on practice questions
  • Capturing notes in an online whiteboard for reference later