Teaching is a challenging profession. Tutors may have less all-round responsibility, but the challenges are much the same. The educators who rise to the top aren’t just those with some miraculous gift. Often they’re the ones who consistently go the extra mile to help their students.
In online tutoring jobs that extra mile can be absolutely crucial, for your students’ success and your future as an online tutor. In fact, because of the special demands of the online medium, you may have to go two extra miles, or three, or four.
The key area in which online tutoring jobs stretch tutors is communication. The internet represents a communications revolution, with unparalleled opportunities for interaction across national and other boundaries. At the same time, it lacks the immediacy of being in the same room with someone. This is a crucial thing to remember in your online tutoring jobs.
Building rapport in your online tutoring jobs isn’t something you can just leave to chance, or allow to grow organically. Videocalls, webinars and other online meeting strategies allow you to interact with students, but you won’t pick up on all the cues that you would in a face-to-face or classroom scenario.
If you don’t want to come across as a talking head, and you want to build a fruitful tutorial relationship, you will have to make extra effort to project your personality and to get to know your students. You won’t be greeting them in the corridors or chatting in the car park, so you will have to devise alternative strategies. Your job isn’t to become their friend, but you do need to find out where they’re coming from. That can be especially important if your online teaching jobs cater for students coming from different cultural backgrounds, or even different countries.
In a classroom, your very presence is part of your arsenal as an effective teacher or tutor. You being there in person is the glue that holds a lesson or tutorial together. In your online tutoring jobs you will probably be making the most of the medium by using diverse resources, including quizzes and games, and puzzles and exercises that learners get on with on their own.
It’s good for students to get on with things and use their initiative, but the challenge for you is to maintain your presence, even when you’re not there. You don’t want students to feel they’re being abandoned to their own devices. You can make the effort to send emails with news and encouragement, so your presence is felt throughout the process. Make the medium work for you in your online tutoring jobs.
Being there for your students in other ways is also something that you should consider building into the way you conduct your online tutoring jobs. Working online can feel remote. There’s nothing blanker than a blank computer screen. If you’re available to your students in between tutorials (within reason, of course) then that all helps to build the rapport, the communication and a relationship in which learning can flourish. Going the extra mile pays dividends down the line in your online tutoring jobs.
