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How to Start An Online Private Tutoring Website: Everything You Need to Know

    Love Shah
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E-Learning has long been an emerging trend in the world of study.

But, in recent times its importance has skyrocketed overnight due to the Covid-19 pandemic. So, if you’re thinking of starting an online tutoring business, you’ve made a sound decision.

However, it’s important to keep many things in mind while setting up your business. It is necessary to replicate the real-world experience as closely as possible if you want it to succeed because the whole premise of tutoring is based on that experience. 

Hence, in this article, we’ll take a look at what you need to have in your tutoring site to replicate the real-world experience and how you can get such a site built for you.

But, first, let’s get started with some reasons that show why online tutoring is booming and will continue to boom.

Reasons why students opt for online tutoring to learn

There are a number of reasons why more and more students opt for online tutoring to learn something instead of regular offline tutoring. Heck, many of them are also dropping out of their regular classroom studies to learn things through this route.

online tutoring

Why is this trend rising steadily?

Well, the four major reasons behind it are as follows:

  • Access to a larger pool of expertise: First of all, online tutoring provides students access to a larger pool of expertise. They no longer remain dependent on local teachers alone – they can learn from tutors across the globe! This allows them to choose a tutor with an in-depth understanding of the subject and someone who’s the best fit for them.
  • Cost-effectiveness: Online tutoring also turns out to be cost-effective. Students get high-quality education without having to spend extra money on conveyance or premium pricing set by experienced tutors. In the world of online tutoring, most of the time there’s someone who can teach better at cheaper rates than offline tutors. 
  • The desired pace of learning: With this mode of learning, students can also learn at their own sweet pace. In the classrooms, teachers teach at their own pace, whether someone can keep up with it or not. But when students learn online from an individual tutor of their choice, that tutor will teach at a pace of their choice.
  • Better learning material: While learning through online tutoring, the quality of education material also improves significantly as there is a lot of high-quality content and reference material available. This can be used to resolve your doubts. Therefore, you also understand concepts in a better way than you would in an offline classroom or tuition setting.

Having said that, these aren’t the only reasons for students turning to online tutoring. But, these 4 are the biggest ones so far that will continue to exist irrespective of the pandemic.

What do you need on your online private tutoring website?

Now, when you understand why online tutoring is booming, let’s take a look at the features that are necessary for any online tutoring site. As we explained above, you need to replicate the real-world experience.

What are the features required for it? Well, let’s have a look:

1. Easy course setup

First of all, your site should allow you to set up a course easily. If it takes too much time and effort to set up a course on your site, you’ll be discouraged from creating great courses. Therefore, you should try to find out a Learning Management System (LMS) that allows easy course set up to build your online tutoring site.

2. Ability to add reference material

The necessity of high-quality reference material is unquestionable in learning. It’s only with highly reliable reference material that you and your students can validate what they’re learning is true. Therefore, your site should also allow you to easily add high-quality reference material (i.e. docs, PDFs, eBooks, tutorials, etc.) anywhere in your course content.

3. Video conferencing functionality

This one is pretty obvious – even after you create the best course in the world on your subject, your students will still have some doubts and you’ll need to clear them through explanations.

So it’s also important for your online tutoring site to have video conferencing functionality through integration with popular video conferencing apps like Zoom, Google Meet, etc. Through conference calls, you can clear the doubts of all your students at once. 

4. Ability to conduct private sessions

As we explained above, no matter how good the quality of your course, some of your students will have doubts about certain things that you’ll need to clear by providing explanations. Now, some of your students may not understand certain concepts even on conference calls.

For those students and concepts, you may need to conduct one-on-one private sessions with them. Therefore, your online tutoring site should also have the functionality to conduct those one-on-one sessions.

5. eCommerce integration in case you need to sell your courses

If you’re going to sell your courses for a flat fee in addition to your tutoring fees, then you’ll also need to have e-commerce functionality on your site. That’s some serious thing because it requires flawless integration and functioning of a shopping cart solution, payment gateway provider, and your CMS.

If any of these things is not working smoothly or not integrated well, your payments will not be processed and you may not be able to sell your courses.

6. Functionality to add community forums

Learning is fun when done with others. Often students learn much faster when they participate in group discussions and other forms of group study, hence, it’s essential for educators to provide that setting too.

How do you do that online?

Well, with the help of forums. You can set up community forums related to your courses to help your students discuss what they’re studying. However, like the previous features, this one can also be added only if there are technical flexibility and support available for it in your LMS. 

7. Ability to create buddy-groups or teacher-assigned study partners

At times, learning can also be improved by creating groups of students whose personalities go well together. As a tutor, you’ll realize that some of your students learn quickly when in the company of each other. So, you may want to form a study group to help them learn better at a faster rate. In order to do that, your website should also have the ability to create buddy groups with study partners assigned by you – the teacher!

8. Gamification features

Another thing that achieves the goal of making learning a fun experience is rewarding your students as they complete their lessons or achieve certain qualifications in their journey of learning. That’s the reason Certifications, Badges, and other similar things exist in the educational system.

They’re available in the world of e-Learning as well, collectively known as Gamification features. While choosing a platform, ensure your LMS provides these features too.

How to build an online tutoring site with these features?

Now when you know the necessary features that must be present in any online tutoring site, you must be thinking how to get them on your site, isn’t it?

Well, the key lies in finding an LMS that includes all these features. And, while you’re here, you don’t need to look any further because we’re going to tell you which LMS provides all these features.

LearnDash

LearnDash, the WordPress-based LMS platform is unarguably the most widely used platform that provides all of the above-mentioned features with lots of flexibility and scalability. It was launched in 2013, and within a short span of 7 years, it has managed to emerge as the most popular choice of LMS for individual instructors as well as schools and universities.

There’s no reason why it can’t work for your online tutoring business too!

Conclusion

Now you know the features that must be present in your online tutoring site, and you also know the LMS that can provide all these features to build your site. As a result, you’re in a good position to start building your e-Learning site. 

However, setting up a new site requires lots of work and expertise. And when it comes to e-Learning sites, it’s even more true.

Therefore, if you’ve never built a website before, you can always consult us for building your online tutoring site. We’ll do a fantastic job, promise!

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Love Shah

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