Some educators earning a living in the domain of online learning offer a variety of services. In theory you could offer a mix of subject tutoring, homework help, test prep and delivering online courses. Some design their online teaching jobs with a narrower focus on one or two of these, with a specialty in online tutoring job the choice of many. Specializing in this sub-field of online learning will still offer variety and your tutoring jobs will be as diverse as your students.

A typical reason for people to seek out the help of people in online tutoring jobs is that they require personalized, individual tuition. Even if you specialize in a certain learner demographic (let’s say senior secondary school learners), you will only be able to deliver a set online tutoring program to a certain extent. For one thing, tutoring jobs focused on helping school age learners (in this example) may require you to tailor your help to accord with the syllabus offered in different schools or states. Above all, you will be required to adapt the approach you take in your tutoring jobs to the needs of individual learners.

Establishing What Learners’ Needs Are

How do you decide what approach to take when you take on a new student?  Sometimes the objectives in your individual tutoring jobs will be clear. For example, student X has been ill and needs catch-up tutoring in subject Y. You will meet online sufficiently regularly to run through the material and it can all be straightforward.

This won’t always be the case. Some students seek help because they are not making the grade but have no idea why. It is your job to assess that and target your tutoring accordingly. You may also encounter students whose under-achievement is attributed to lack of application, poor teaching at school or one of a host of other reasons. You can’t always take learners’ (or parents’) assessments at face value. A student who is labeled as ‘lazy’ may in fact be gifted but bored, or a clearly smart but under-achieving student may have a hidden learning disability such as dyslexia or attention deficit disorder.

Experienced educators are often able to make accurate intuitive judgments about where to concentrate their attention in each of their tutoring jobs. It can be helpful for less experienced tutors to make a more formal assessment at the outset. There may be existing tools to do this in your subject area or you may want to devise your own. In online tutoring jobs it can be a little harder to establish a relationship with learners than in face-to-face teaching contexts. Rather than starting your tutoring with a conventional test, you can try using interactive materials to assess learners without putting them off.

Personalizing Your Tutoring Jobs

Once you have an idea what individual students need you can personalize your tutoring jobs as appropriate. Though this clearly means more work for you, it also means that your tutoring jobs will demand you to develop and use a range of skills – and that can add variety and interest to your work.