Investor's Business Daily, August 14th, 2007
Boston area teacher Eileen Ng does a lot of chatting most nights.
Her chatting is typing online instant messages back and forth with high schoolers, helping them learn geometry and biology. Sometimes they draw out problems and solutions on an electronic white board together.
Ng started online tutoring in February, after going on maternity leave. She had tutored students in-person before, and saw online tutoring as a way to keep up her skills without having to leave home.
Her offline tutoring would cover a lot of bases, Ng says. But online tutoring has turned out to be quite different.
"I feel the sessions are more along the lines of students who are stuck in a particular spot or have a very specific question," she said. "I don't do as much studying for quizzes with them, or reviewing, say, a whole chapter in a book."
A mini-industry has arisen around the idea of online tutoring. It aims to take a chunk out of the overall K-12 tutoring and test preparation market, which consulting firm Eduventures predicts will bring in $28 billion in the 2008-09 school year.
New York-based Tutor.com, Ng's employer, is one firm that has carved a niche in this online education field. More than 2.5 million students have used its services, says the company's founder and chief executive, George Cigale.
Said First To Be 'Live'
Cigale says his company launched the very first ever live online tutoring service in 2000. There was other tutoring done online then, he says, but none available to students live, on demand. Tutor.com spread the word about its Live Homework Help product at first mostly through public libraries and after-school programs. It's now serving kids in 43 states in 1,600 public libraries, he says.
"The reason it's spread ... is that kids tell us whether they got the help they needed, and 95% say they would recommend this to a friend," Cigale said.
The company has gotten most of its revenue from library systems that buy its services by subscription, as a resource for students to use on library computers. The boom in broadband led to more use, Cigale says.
"Parents started calling us to ask, 'Can I buy this for my child to use at home?'" Cigale said. "The answer for the following six years was, 'No -- go (use it at) your local library.'"
After streamlining the software and service, Tutor.com Direct launched last year. It offers $26-a-month subscription service or a $35-an-hour option.
One big difference with online vs. offline tutoring is that online students can choose to use the service for just several minutes at a time -- for instance, when they're stuck on a particular math problem.
"The usage tends to be primarily math and science," Cigale said. "The sweet spot is really 7th to 11th grade, when students are taking pre-algebra and algebra courses."
On average, he says, sessions tend to run about 25 minutes, though they've gone as long as 180 minutes for advanced placement physics and calculus. Tutor.com has about 1,500 tutors, but it plans to nearly double that number by summer's end.
'Chatting' Takes Practice
Ng, who has taught for seven years in Boston public schools, says she faced a learning curve getting used to Internet-based tutoring. She says Tutor.com's mentoring program and trial runs helped.
"At first I had difficulty with the chat format. I wasn't used to it. I'm not a big IM-er," she said. "I would say the white board is central for math and most sciences. With most geometry problems, I can quickly draw a sketch and show what I'm talking about. The first three to five minutes are waiting for the student to reproduce the question, but once they do and have the question up, we can go right to where they're stuck."
The company started in 1998 with seed money from the Princeton Review REVU. Cigale says Tutor.com has now raised about $30 million in venture capital.
Investors include the venture arm of chipmaker Intel INTC, Intel Capital.
"The technology we built, the infrastructure we built, has been innovative, difficult to think through and very expensive -- it's in the millions of dollars," Cigale said.
Tutors sign up for sessions online. They can see which time slots are open and how many students are seeking tutoring.
"A child simply says, 'I'm in 8th grade and need to connect with an algebra tutor,'" Cigale said. "Those (grade and subject) factors determine what tutor we route them to. That tutor sees a pop-up screen and hears an audible alarm."
