Tutoring Moved Online
Over the past few months, our learning has been drastically affected. The closure of schools during Circuit Breaker resulted in the adoption of e-learning, where students and teachers meet online for classes from the comforts of their homes.
The implementation of the circuit breaker had personally affected my learning in several ways. As a student, I had to make do with alternate learning avenues and learn to cope with the newfound learning environment. As a tutor, I struggled to shift tutoring online as I was now constrained to seeing my tutees only from my computer screen.
For lack of a better description, conducting online tuition was like walking into a battlefield of unexpected incidences. From dropping out of Zoom calls as a result of losing internet connection, to chasing distracted students to complete their work in time, online lessons proved to be harder than I expected despite adequate prior training.
However, this is not an individual struggle. I believe many, if not most, tutors and teachers had to go through this foreign experience. To glean further insights into this situation, I spoke to Elyssa Koh (pictured below), a volunteer from Heartware Tuition Programme (HWTP).
Online lessons and its intricacies
Theoretically speaking, conducting online lessons should be no different from physical lessons. The same content is taught by the same teachers, to the same students. How difficult could it be?
When asked about challenges of online tutoring, the ACS(I) student responded, “It’s quite easy for them to switch off their cameras and their mics, so it makes me feel like I’m talking to a wall sometimes.”
Her words truly resonated with my experiences. Physical lessons meant that the teachers were always within the vicinity, and that any misdemeanour would be easily spotted. However, teachers are literally out of reach from the students during online lessons, and students could get away with their mischief with the click of a button!
In the same vein, distractions remain a big problem for all educators. Anything, big or small, can fascinate the eyes of children, and it takes away their attention from the (dreadful) tasks at hand. With online tutoring, we can only call out their names and check in on them as frequently as possible. This is never as effective as having them right in front of us, where our presence can retain their attention.
Furthermore, problems arise beyond lesson hours. In order to assess our tutees’ knowledge and progress, homework submissions pose a whole new realm of problems to solve when conducting lessons online. Lessons at HWTP focused on going through the provided curriculum, so such problems were unlikely to arise. On the other hand, guiding students to use online platforms to submit their homework was an obstacle that teachers had to face.
Students were able to submit their completed work online via platforms such as Google Classroom. However, for tutees eager to be dismissed from their lessons, tutors struggled to get the homework in before leaving the lesson. At times, despite repeated emails to parents, some homework remained missing for a long period of time, possibly even undone. This is unlike regular lessons, where physically handing in worksheets was the simple solution.
The other side of the fence
Conducting online lessons is no walk in the park. It requires elaborate planning to keep lessons interesting and more effort is needed to ensure that every student understands the topics covered. However, despite the challenges, we cannot deny the benefits that we reap from online lessons and tutoring.
For Koh, the benefit of online tutoring comes in the form of convenience, “I was actually quite concerned with how far the school I was assigned to was from my home.”
Many tutors conduct lessons at students’ homes or at centres, and at tutees’ schools in HTWP’s case. While tutors are matched to a school that is most convenient for them, deployment is dependent on the distribution of tutees, which means that tutors may not be assigned to a school that is necessarily close to their homes or schools. With online tutoring, tutors no longer have to fret over concerns of travelling time and distance, as online tutoring can be conducted anywhere, as long as they have access to online platforms to attend classes.
This time saved also gives us room to engage in other activities. For myself, conducting online tutoring meant I could spend more time devising unique games and activities to be done during online tutoring.
On top of saving time, online tutoring also meant access to more online resources. Functions to share videos real-time in tuition sessions allowed tutors to use multimedia presentations to engage students. With online quiz platforms such as Kahoot!, we can also assess students’ understanding quickly and easily while keeping them on their toes for upcoming quizzes.
HWTP tutor Faith playing games to help her HWTP child be more interested in mathematics!
Using live conferencing platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet, we can enjoy clearer communication as well. “[The tutees] would type into the Chat to let me know that they’re unsure of questions, so I’m better able to adjust my pace when I go through the slides,” Koh said.
Especially for younger children, using a keyboard might appear foreign to them in many ways. However, by contemplating on what they wanted to communicate, the Chat function may serve more than just a mere platform for talking through text. From understanding sentence structures to spelling, using a keyboard to type their intended words can help develop students’ language ability as well.
At the beginning, moving tutoring online was a cause for concern for many of us. With the responsibility to enrich our students’ academic endeavours, we had to devise creative ways to keep them engaged and involved in their learning journey considering the remote learning environment where we have less control of. In the end, despite the challenges, there are many more benefits we can reap from this online learning and tutoring experience that can come in handy in the future. Most importantly, as tutors, teachers and students, it is important that we explore and discover how to utilise the resources given to us to circumvent the challenges of online teaching, and even to bring learning to greater heights. The mindset to look at the silver lining of things should resonate in other aspects of our lives; where there is an obstacle, there is something great ahead of us.