Posts tagged online tutor

2) “Ask Live” feature - On the new Wisekangaroo.com website students can post a live tutoring request using the Ask Live button. These requests are posted in real-time to theWisekangaroo Live Feed Dashboard . Tutors can browse through the live requests and interact with students in real-time and start a virtual classroom from the dashboard. This will help tutors find new customers. 

3) Paypal Integration - Tutors can now get paid instantly via Paypal when a student makes a payment. There is no waiting time and we do not hold your payments. As soon as a student makes a payment you get paid. We even allow you to set custom rates for each tutoring session. This gives you flixibility to change your rates based on the students needs.

We believe that the above 3 new features along with the many more under-the-hood changes will make Wisekangaroo the best online marketplace for tutors. We hope that you will take the time to explore the new website and will enjoy using the new features as much as we have enjoyed creating them.
 

The Wisekangaroo Community Management Team
www.wisekangaroo.com

I frequently get asked about my motivation behind starting an online tutoring service that uses live video to connect tutors and students. It made me think that I need to do a better job at communicating the “WHY” for Wisekangaroo. 

I firmly believe that education is the foundation upon which societies build their future. Good education prepares young individuals to grow into responsible citizens thus creating a better community. Today more than ever before, tertiary education is considered a reliable predictor of workplace success and a college master’s degree is worth $1.3 million more in lifetime earnings than a high school diploma. 

With so many factors favoring education, it is alarming to see that school drop out rates have been rising for girls as well as boys across Australia. Every year in Australia around 50,000 young people aged from 15 to 19 drop out of education and training and are unemployed. Student attrition in Australia’s universities comes at a cost of more than $1.4 billion a year. In addition to dollar losses, there are also human costs. A student who drops out often sees the decision as indicative of failure and this can have long-lasting negative psychological and emotional costs. There may also be costs to students’ families in terms of the investments made in travel, accommodation, textbooks and other study materials.

A number of reasons contribute to student attrition from schools and universities, most of which are outside the control of the student themselves. These include

• Money,
• Learning environment at school,
• Family situation, and
• The community they live in.

Moreover, the mass education system in schools puts slow learners at a disadvantage and once a student starts to lag in class it is very difficult to catch up with the rest of the class.

Schools try to do their best to help all students and to retain those that may drop out due to the above issues but can only do so much with limited resources and budget cuts. This brings the focus on parents. In most urban families these days both parents go to work and find it difficult to spend personal one-on-one time educating their children. The problem is compounded for disadvantaged and underprivileged children in aboriginal families, families of refugees, single parent households and those living in isolated outer suburbs in Australia. It is no coincidence that children with learning disabilities and those belonging to disadvantaged families have the highest rates of school drop outs.

This has led to personal one-on-one tutors and group tutoring classes playing a major role in helping students grasp key concepts outside of schools so that they can keep up with the rest of their class. Although tutors are of great help to students, the tutoring industry in general is quite disorganized in terms of quality and trustworthiness of tutors, price per hour for a subject and availability and location of tutors in a particular suburb. Besides this, the in-person tuition delivery model itself is inefficient, expensive and inadequate for the current needs of students.

• In-person tutoring requires both the student and tutors to be physically co-located which restricts tutors and students to their local areas.   
• Precious time and money is wasted in travelling for both tutors as well as students.
• There are genuine safety concerns in scheduling tutoring sessions too early or too late in the day.
• Students benefit the most if they receive tutoring help when they are stuck on a problem which could be at any time of the day and at any place - home or school.  This means that they need a tutor who can be accessible anytime and anywhere.

Wisekangaroo’s online tutoring marketplace can help solve all the above problems. At Wisekangaroo, our mission is to reshape the education industry by harnessing the knowledge, skills and experience of the best teachers in the world and making it accessible to students from anywhere and at all times.

Wisekangaroo is a tutoring marketplace which means that students can compare several tutors based on their qualifications, hourly rates and past reviews before hiring them. Wisekangaroo’s online tutors offer personal one-on-one tutoring using live online video thus making the entire tutoring process convenient and efficient for both students and their tutors. No travel, no hassles. All you need is a laptop, web cam and microphone. 

We hope that students who can afford a tutor will save time and money in finding  online tutors on Wisekangaroo. We also realize that for every student who can afford a tutor there are 10 others who cannot. These students are the most vulnerable and most likely to drop out from schools and universities. In the coming days we will be launching a free online tutoring program that will connect volunteer tutors from around the world with underprivileged and disadvantaged students for unlimited free one-on-one tutoring sessions. With this program we hope to reach hundreds of disadvantaged and underprivileged students from remote areas who are in need of help but cannot afford a tutor because of monetary problems or lack of good tutors in their local areas. We hope to raise awareness about the issue of school drop outs and help to retain students in school by providing them free tutoring help in any subjects whenever they want, where ever they want.  

If you would like to get involved as a volunteer tutor please fill out our volunteer as an online tutor form or write to us at support@wisekangaroo.com with your name and contact details and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Also if you know a disadvantaged student who may need a tutor but cannot afford one please let us know too.

Atul Pandey
Founder Wisekangaroo

Today we are launching a new FREE homework help service called #AskWiseKangaroo on Facebook and Twitter. 

If you are a student who is in need of a quick answer to a Science or Maths question and have no idea whom to go to, send your question to our Facebook tutors or our Twitter tutors and one of our online tutors will answer it for you. You could also tweet your questions with a hashtag #askwisekangaroo for quick replies. 

We hope that with these 2 services students will be able to access online tutors more easily using the social media tools that they are already familiar with. Give it a try and if you see a question that you might know the answer to, don’t hold back in replying to it.

Happy Online Learning.

Atul Pandey

(Founder Wisekangaroo)

According to the Australian Tutoring Association, tutoring is a $6 Billion industry in Australia alone. Children start attending tuition classes when they are as young as 10 years old. Most parents spend on an average between $51 - $90 a week on tutoring.

I recently visited one of the most sought after tuition centers in the Upper North Shore and spoke to the owner about why do parents admit their students to their center. She mentioned something amazing. She said

Even though the “Selective Exam” test papers have been getting tougher and tougher for the past 3 years, the cut-off grades have been going higher and higher. It simply means that students are working harder than ever before and that there is no scope for any mistake.

There is a lot of pressure on kids to perform well in their exams these days. From a very young age schools classify their students into “Extensions” and “OCs” .. just another term for the creme de la creme.

Families where both parents work are left with no choice but to choose the best tutors to coach their kids. However choosing a tutor itself is a tough job. With so many tutoring services out there how do you select the one that suits your child’s learning style?

We at Wisekangaroo want to understand the most challenging problems that parents face when looking for a tutor for their children. We want to build an online tutoring marketplace that makes selecting a tutor a breeze, suites your child’s learning style, is safe, convenient and inexpensive. On Wisekangaroo, you can find Maths tutors, Science tutors, English tutors and tutors for most foreign languages. 

Please fill out our “Parent Tutor Survey” to help us understand how best we can server the needs of YOUR KIDS and YOU.   

Atul Pandey

(Founder Wisekangaroo)

If you have’nt already seen Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk about “Changing education paradigms” , I highly recommend that you do so. The talk emphasizes the need for changing the way we think about delivering education to kids today. We live in an age where information is being fed to us at a rate that is far greater than what we can absorb. Technology has revolutionized the way information is distributed and consumed. It is almost ironic that the biggest and the most important information distribution industry should be the one that lags in the adoption of this information revolution. I am talking about the education industry here.

Today, more than ever before we need a better online education ecosystem where educators, publishers, start-ups, investors and think-tanks come together to define policies, processes, technologies and tools to set the stage for the future of education.

Wisekangaroo is a brick-in-the-wall for this education ecosystem. Wisekangaroo is an e-learning marketplace that wants to reshape the education delivery model by connecting educators and students and giving them tools to connect, communicate and collaborate using the latest internet technologies. On Wisekangaroo, students find online tutors who use online video communication tools to make learning fun and interesting. Wisekangaroo is currently in Beta and is COMPLETELY FREE to sign up and use.    

Watch this space for some exciting stuff that will be coming out in the next few weeks.

Atul Pandey.

(Founder Wisekangaroo)