Online Tutoring and VOIP

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is the use of two-way, voice communication – like a telephone – over the Internet. This technology has been around for a decade or so. For online tutoring, though VOIP will be a common feature in the future, its past and present have been characterized by more hype than usefulness.

Why the hype around voice? People are accustomed to being tutored in-person, implying the use of voice. Therefore, voice is assumed to be a required element of tutoring. It is not. Tutoring requirements for math and other subjects are the efficient communication of symbols (it’s hard to describe the quadratic equation over the telephone), graphing and drawing ability, and text input. In fact, when students are being tutored effectively, there are lengthy pauses while students and tutors are working through problems. The presence or absence of voice has no bearing on the length of these pauses. So, for the most part, VOIP neither increases the quality or efficiency of communication. It is simply more familiar. Though SMARTHINKING will offer voice in a limited capacity in some subjects starting in January, we have provided hundreds of thousands of tutoring sessions without it. In fact, VOIP can cause more problems than it solves. Among the challenges of VOIP are:

• Technical support – The number of students needing help with headsets, microphones, sound cards, bandwidth, processing capacity, voice installations, and simply turning the volume up, is significant.
• Bandwidth – Using VOIP requires more bandwidth than a whiteboard or chatroom connection. With the increase in broadband penetration, this problem is diminishing, but it is still present in dial-up and shared bandwidth connections.
• Archiving (Memory) – A whiteboard tutoring session can be archived by saving a single image or series of images. When a voice track is added, the memory needed for archiving increases exponentially.
• Archiving (Quality Control) – A tutoring session saved as an image can be reviewed in a couple of minutes or less. A voice track requires the reviewer to listen to the entire tutoring session (an average of 25 minutes long).
• Software installations – VOIP usually requires an installation of a program – rather than a flash or java download – onto the student’s computer.
• Glitches and Voice Quality – For many users, VOIP can result in tutors and students talking over each other, waiting for the other to speak when the other doesn’t realize it, and other barriers to the tutoring interaction. With students already frustrated with their academic work, adding communication and technical frustration can be the last straw.

For the most part, online tutoring companies that do use VOIP require students to install software locally, sometimes give away headsets and microphones, and do not archive tutoring sessions. Installation of software requires a significant amount of forethought on the part of the student/buyer. Shipping of computer accessories dramatically inceases cost and also requires forethought. The lack of archiving impacts quality control and dispute resolution procedures. Students using services that provide on-demand support to struggling students, like SMARTHINKING’s services, typically do not have the time or the patience to go through a significant installation process at the same time that they are struggling with their homework. Requiring such installation serves to limit, rather than increase, the number of students using these services.

Having said all of this, voice may be a requirement for effective live tutoring in some subjects. Foreign languages, for instance, would seem to require voice. However, on the whole, lack of voice has had no adverse effects on student tutoring demand or satisfaction. Once VOIP becomes embedded into operating systems and browsers and voice input devices (headsets and microphones) are standard computer accessories, it will be interesting to see whether students choose to use, or not use, VOIP. This is getting closer and closer to reality as more computers come with Bluetooth connections that can integrate with mobile phone ear-pieces. However, for now, in SMARTHINKING’s experience, VOIP serves to limit the market for tutoring rather than expand it.

Defining Online Tutoring Quality

What is quality education? What is quality teaching? How can one measure it? These are some of the thorniest questions in education today. No single system or metric can determine it. For instance, standardized tests suffer from the fact that students may not test well, may have been trained on the wrong material, or may be having a bad day. Student survey data may reflect student opinions of the teacher rather than opinions of the learning. For instance, numerous studies in post-secondary education show a positive correlation between lenient grading and student satisfaction. Longitudinal data from schools, such as job placement rates or lifetime earnings of students, cannot be easily compared to each other because students at different schools enter and exit with different skill levels. Lastly, portfolio analysis -- the compilation and examination of a given student's work over a period of time -- suffers from the subjectivity of the teacher. Due to the flaws of any single metric, those that need to measure educational quality -- such as schools, accrediting agencies and parents -- are forced to rely on a meta-analysis of all of the metrics listed above, input analysis (credentials of instructors, training processes, and others), and reputation.

So what does this mean for online tutoring? A quick search of the Internet will demonstrate that every online tutoring company claims to have "high quality" tutors. Most will claim that their tutors are extensively trained. All list fabulous quotes from users. All show terrific survey results. All claim grade increases. So, how does a parent or a school determine who really is better? Using the above framework, they need to look at inputs, metrics, and reputation. Of these three, inputs are the least manipulable because inputs impact the cost structure of a business. They are also the least advertised, because they are a proxy for educational quality. However, they probably provide the best indication of the educational value of a service.

INPUTS
By looking at what goes into the tutoring process, one can get a sense of what should come out. The inputs that are relevant to online tutoring are tutor credentials, tutor training, tutor oversight, tutoring philosophy, service availability, service levels, breadth of service, and ease-of-use.

1. Tutor Credentials: Generally, tutors with advanced degrees in their discipline have a better understanding of the material than those that don't. This is particularly relevant in math and science. Companies that don't indicate the degree levels of their tutors are typically relying on current college students or graduates as opposed to masters level and PhD tutors.
2. Tutor Training: Just about everyone has been taught by someone who is brilliant in their discipline, but doesn't know how to teach. Tutor training on how to tutor is just as, if not more, important than subject level expertise. When students need help, they are typically frustrated and lack confidence. An effective tutor not only helps them with the subject matter, but encourages them as well. At SMARTHINKING, we call this the "affective" element of tutoring. Again, every company will claim to do this. However, if a company is serious about tutor training, its tutors will be part-time employees as opposed to independent contractors. Though hiring tutors as independent contractors is simpler and cheaper, IRS regulations require that any position that requires significant training as a job requirement must be filled by an employee.
3. Tutor Oversight: Tutoring is a one-to-one social experience that combines the delivery of subject knowledge with, hopefully, the social cues necessary to encourage the learner. However, as with any human interaction, there can be miscommunication between student and tutor, mistakes made in the provision of information, and differences in communication styles. Identifying and addressing these sorts of issues requires the subjective perspective of experienced educators. At SMARTHINKING, we have former college professors that oversee each of our disciplines. Further, they contribute to the scholarship surrounding online tutoring.
4. Tutoring Philosophy: An online tutoring service can be a learning service or an answer service. While not mutually exclusive, they are certainly not the same. Frequently, students want an answer, not a lesson. Tutoring companies that evaluate their tutors solely on student satisfaction ratings give tutors the incentive to do the work for the students. While this might make good business sense for a company trying to sell its services to consumers, it's not good education.
5. Service Availability, Breadth and Levels: All of these inputs are for naught if an online tutoring service doesn't provide service at the moment and in a subject that the student needs it and without an onerous wait time.
6. Ease-of-Use: Again, all of these inputs are for naught if the online tutoring technology is not user-friendly and capable of supporting educational interactions. For instance, Voice over the Internet (VOIP) is a feature that is frequently requested, but seldom used. This is because the set-up and performance for VOIP -- microphones, speakers, soundcards, volume settings, bandwidth, archiving, non-duplex service, voice lagtimes, and others -- make it more cumbersome than helpful. Also, math notation is notoriously difficult to do on the Internet. Technology that enables easy superscripts, subscripts, fractions, graphing, and other mathematical symbols enables effective online tutoring.
   

METRICS
Every tutoring company, SMARTHINKING included, touts its student survey results, quotes from satisfied customers, and sample tutoring interactions. Frankly, all of these are easily manipulated for marketing purposes. The only outcome metric that is more objective than the others are independent studies conducted by clients or others. While these will certainly have their share of methodological flaws, the bias of the company is removed.

REPUTATION
Because outcome data is so manipulable and input data is hard to discern, reputation and, by extension, brand, plays a role in determining educational quality. In large part, reputation is created by quality service over time. It is also reflected by a company's client base. For instance, to determine educational quality, one might look at the tutoring services chosen by other schools and educators. Presumably, other educators will vet a tutoring company on its educational features more fully than a parent, student or library might.

Despite the emphasis on testing in No Child Left Behind, the pressure being put on college accrediting agencies to measure school quality, and the growing demand for consumer educational services, the question of what is educational quality is not likely to be solved soon. In the meantime, those who need to look at quality are best served by evaluating an education provider holistically on inputs, metrics, and reputation, with an emphasis on inputs.

Colleges (and High Schools) Will Compete On Academic Service Levels

Recently, I have given several presentations to higher education administrators about how call center theory can be applied to educational services. An online, drop-in tutoring service, like SMARTHINKING, is essentially a call center, but without the "call" and without the "center." To create this presentation, we developed a fairly complex model to analyze the interaction between the following variables:

• The number of tutors staffed;
• The average number of students expected;
• The length of a tutoring session;
• The desired average wait time for a student (the service level);
• And the variance embedded within all of these variables.

With this model, we can predict the number of tutors that need to be staffed (ie. 15) to meet a desired service level (ie. average wait time less than 4 minutes) with a desired tutor efficiency (ie. 75% of the time a tutor is working with a student). The upshot of all of this was that, to run a cost-effective, drop-in tutoring service with reasonable service levels, you need to have A LOT of expected students. This is becaues the session length for tutoring is far longer than that of your typical call center. I found this model fascinating, and I was sure that others would as well.

Others didn't. Perhaps I need to polish my presentation skills, but when I was explaining the model and the results I saw a lot of vacant stares and more than a few nodding heads. However, rather than ascribe the lackluster response to my own performance, I'll use it as a pretext to draw some generalizations about education. At a minimum, this will rationalize away my disappointment. Perhaps it will even be insightful!

As I thought about my presentation, I think the real reason that listeners were unmoved is that the presentation correlated with almost nothing in their daily work lives. In fact, at the beginning of the presentation, I asked how many schools had defined service level goals for faculty members to meet. For instance, were faculty required to return a paper or an e-mail in X amount of time? Only 1 school out of 150 indicated they had such service levels. It occurred to me that these basic principles of service are simply not considered when schools deliver education. This, I think, will change dramatically in the next 10 years.

As more classes are taken online, higher education increasingly becomes a commodity. Online, geographic barriers to student choice are gone. The remaining differentiators -- price and quality -- remain. In my opinion, the traditional pricing structure of higher education will soon crumble as well. If students can take an english 101 course at a community college for 1/3 of the price of the 4 year college, and the credit is comparable AND the student can take it online, pricing will eventually become more rational. With these changes, the only element left that an institution controls is its academic quality. Within academic quality, the content of general education subjects rarely change. So, for those schools not competing on student selectivity or brand, all that's left is the level of service that they provide to the student.

This is a lesson that has already been learned by higher education administrators in admissions and technology. Colleges understand the impact of service levels when recruiting students and the impact of service levels as it relates to tech support. It is ironic that the real product of education, student learning from courses and services, hasn't incorporated any of these lessons. For most schools -- particularly public institutions -- this is a result of the traditional higher education governance structure. Traditionally, academic decisions and business decisions are made by the faculty and the administators respectively. For schools that want to compete successfully online, academic and administrators will need to work together to focus on the services that provide the greatest benefit to their customers -- the students.

The Direct To Consumer Conundrum

I'm digging this blog idea. Prior to starting SMARTHINKING, I was a freelance writer for education and technology issues. I wrote for a variety of magazines and institutions -- Converge magazine (now defunct), Wired (a couple of very small pieces), CEO Forum on Education and Technology, National School Board Association, and others. This feels like those days again...

In the last six months, there has been resurgent interest in selling online tutoring services directly to consumers. One company plans to offer low-cost tutoring from tutors located in India and has raised over $10 million to try it. Another company is trying to raise a similar amount to aggressively expand into the direct-to-consumer market. This investor fervor hearkens back to the days of the late '90's when investors and companies showed similar irrational exuberance over the online tutoring market (from which my company benefited, to a degree).

The last decade is littered with companies that have tried to sell online tutoring services directly to consumers. In the late '90's one company raised close to $20 million on the theory that it could create a market for tutors offering their services and students needing tutors. Another well-known company invested close to $40 million to develop a direct-to-consumer online tutoring service. While both of these companies are still around, their business models have radically changed. After plowing through its $20 million, the first company bought a much smaller company that allowed them to sell services directly to public libraries -- effectively abandoning the direct-to-consumer model. It is now trying to resurrect the direct-to-consumer channel. The second company integrated its online tutoring offerings into it's place-based tutoring services -- effectively creating a hybrid tutoring option. Neither company has come close to justifying the original investment. From my own experience, SMARTHINKING ran several well-executed pilot programs targeting the direct-to-consumer market with very little success.

Tutoring seems like a market ripe for "disintermediation." According to Eduventures, the tutoring market is worth $4.5 billion and growing at 15% per year. It's also highly fragmented with price points ranging from $8 - $200 per hour, varying levels of quality, and imperfect mechanisms for quality assurance. In short, it seems like a perfect market for the aggregating ability of the Internet. In theory, some company should be able to offer a consistent level of service at a relatively low price to create a respected online tutoring brand that would aggregate both tutors and students. In practice, this has not been the case.

So, what happened? One answer might be that students don't really like online tutoring. Perhaps face-t0-face tutoring provides a level of personal interaction that is lacking on the Internet. While this is undoubtedly true, online tutoring offers other advantages like convenience of time and place, anonymity, archiving, and others. Further, usage of SMARTHINKING's online tutoring services is growing by more than 50% per year with most students using the service more than one time. Student surveys show that students really like the service. So, again from our experience, this isn't the case.

I believe that that the direct-to-consumer market hasn't worked because there is a mismatch between the market to whom online tutoring appeals and the consumer purchasing patterns for educational services. There are 2 types of tutoring. They are "prescriptive" and "drop-in." Prescriptive tutoring is where a student attends regularly scheduled tutoring sessions, frequently with the same tutor. Often, this tutoring will be tied to a pre-tutoring assessment to identify student weaknesses. The largest market for Prescriptive tutoring seems to be in the K-7 grades. Drop-in tutoring is where students get help from tutors when they need help. Essentially, this is a call center model for tutoring. Almost the entire consumer market for tutoring resides in the Prescriptive market. All of the well-know tutoring companies offer Prescriptive tutoring services. Prior to the advent of the Internet, Drop-in tutoring was restricted to places where students could be aggregated to create sufficient volume to offer a drop-in service. In practice, this was limited to learning assistance centers (ie. math labs) at colleges and universities. The Internet has allowed Drop-in tutoring to expand beyond the residential school. Because Drop-in tutoring requires students to initiate the interaction, this is most appropriate for high school and college students.

This is a rough and incomplete generalization, but I believe that education has 2 functions. These are socialization and knowledge transfer. When students are young, socialization is more important. As students age, knowledge transfer gains in importance. No matter how well constructed, online tutoring is simply a less powerful socialization experience than face-to-face tutoring. Therefore, online tutoring has not been as popular or successful with younger students. On the other hand, the convenience of the drop-in model of online tutoring is excellent at knowledge transfer. This model is used successfully by older students -- typically high school and college students. So, to sum up, online tutoring works well for older students, but not as well for younger students.

This is another rough and incomplete generalization, but consumer purchasing of educational products and services is restricted to three general categories. These are:

1. Educational objects and toys -- like reading software or Leapfrog's toys;
2. High stakes test prep -- SAT prep, etc...
3. "Get Ahead" services -- Tutoring for young students.

Numbers 1 and 3 appeal to parents of younger students. Number 2 appeals to parents and students in the high school and college levels. Parents of high school students are willing to pay for test prep because there is a very clear goal in mind. They have not been willing to purchase Drop-in tutoring because the value isn't as clear. College students will spend a ton of money on tuition and textbooks, but don't buy much of anything after that. Again, because the relationship between an external tutoring service and passing a class isn't extremely obvious. What this means is that, the element of online tutoring that works well -- Drop-in tutoring-- is not well matched to the buying power and habits of the students for whom it works well.

It is entirely possible that I have misjudged the market dynamics. Perhaps the consumer market for online tutoring in the late '90's and early '00's wasn't mature enough yet. Perhaps the new marketing power of search engines is enough to create this consumer market. Perhaps today's investment in the consumer online tutoring market will prove to be rational exuberance. However, I don't think student and parent buying patterns have changed very much. Here are the lessons that I draw:

1. Drop-in online tutoring works well.
2. Drop-in online tutoring is best sold as an "add-on" to a school or as part of a bundled solution with another educational product.
3. Students will come to expect Drop-in online tutoring as part of their educational experience, rather than purchase it independently.

The next year will tell if there really is a consumer market for online tutoring.