Never worked for them in particular, but my experience with such online tutoring businesses hasn’t been great: generally don’t get many hours, are expected to commit fully to being available at certain times every week (which when in uni, with tests etc. at unexpected times, isn’t too possible—might be possible for you in your situation) and they take a fair chunk of your earnings. On one occasion I put a lot of time into signing up, getting documents etc. to verify myself, and then never got a single student. On the other hand, signing up for services such as www.firsttutors.com has been great (not sure if this is international, I’ve been using the NZ site, but think it is). Basically it’s a repository of tutors, people come and leave messages for you to see if you’d be a good fit and if you have times you could both make it, and then you each pay a small one-off fee (usually <$20 for the tutor) for the website providing the interface and get eachother’s contact details. I’ve set up both online and in-person tutoring through this, online being about a fifth of all requests. The first year I used it I got about 3 or 4 students through it (each of whom I met for one or two hours a week and lasted on average ~6 months). Nowadays, with a few good reviews on there, I’ve put up my fees to double what they used to be and still get about 15 requests a year, each of which is good for about 2 hours tutoring a week—I don’t take them all, but I could. And the fee the website charges is nothing in comparison to the hours I get out of it, usually it’s less than an hour’s work to make it back.
Thank you for the link. I had not heard of First Tutors before, but they seem to be a solid choice and one I’ll research more. The flexibility is a very enticing quality, considering the high level of control I’ve seen in other service providers.
Never worked for them in particular, but my experience with such online tutoring businesses hasn’t been great: generally don’t get many hours, are expected to commit fully to being available at certain times every week (which when in uni, with tests etc. at unexpected times, isn’t too possible—might be possible for you in your situation) and they take a fair chunk of your earnings. On one occasion I put a lot of time into signing up, getting documents etc. to verify myself, and then never got a single student. On the other hand, signing up for services such as www.firsttutors.com has been great (not sure if this is international, I’ve been using the NZ site, but think it is). Basically it’s a repository of tutors, people come and leave messages for you to see if you’d be a good fit and if you have times you could both make it, and then you each pay a small one-off fee (usually <$20 for the tutor) for the website providing the interface and get eachother’s contact details. I’ve set up both online and in-person tutoring through this, online being about a fifth of all requests. The first year I used it I got about 3 or 4 students through it (each of whom I met for one or two hours a week and lasted on average ~6 months). Nowadays, with a few good reviews on there, I’ve put up my fees to double what they used to be and still get about 15 requests a year, each of which is good for about 2 hours tutoring a week—I don’t take them all, but I could. And the fee the website charges is nothing in comparison to the hours I get out of it, usually it’s less than an hour’s work to make it back.
Thank you for the link. I had not heard of First Tutors before, but they seem to be a solid choice and one I’ll research more. The flexibility is a very enticing quality, considering the high level of control I’ve seen in other service providers.