Recently, I decided to take a tour of a few tutoring sites; I looked at Huntington Learning Center, Tutor.com, Sylvan Learning Center, and TutorVista . While Sylvan and Huntington do not offer online tutoring like the other two, I chose to include Sylvan in this survey of tutoring sites to explore the short-comings in the current offering of tutoring available. The focus of this article is not on the quality of tutoring available, but on the subjects offered. This is what has led me to ask, what about the rest of us?
First there is Tutor.com. On subject offerings, this tutoring site offers the most focused subjects found throughout this survey. On their subject page they tutor in 14 specific subjects within the broad categories of Math, Science, English, and History. Some of these specific areas include: trigonometry, chemistry, proof reading, and research. While I did not see it stated, my assumption is that help in these subjects is limited to the High School level.
The second site I explored was TutorVista. Similar to Tutor.com, TutorVista offers 24/7 tutoring, 12 specialized subjects, 3 general areas, and limited to high school students. Additionally, many of their specialized subjects differ: statistics and discrete mathematics for instance. While both TutorVista and Tutor.com offer some focused tutoring acquiring help in a high school economics class appears to be beyond their scope.
Next, there is the Huntington Learning Center. Huntington offers assistance in 9 subjects and appears to strongly focus on the fundamental basics of learning. This focused tutoring center fits correctly into the role that a tutor traditionally held: “to teach or guide individually in a special subject or for a particular purpose” (for a discussion on this topic I invite you to read my editorials on Education and the Role of Tutors: Past Present and Future; Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Huntington specifically states that they focus on children ages 5 – 17, and they are the only site that claims to offer tutoring specifically in Phonics and Vocabulary.
Sylvan Learning Center is the last site I circumambulated. They focus on tutoring students K-12 across 9 subject areas. One such subject Sylvan offers is Homework Help, a very generalized area, where a student may get whatever help is necessary for what appears to be any subject. Unlike Huntington, which correctly utilizes tutors focusing them in specific areas, Sylvan appears to have primarily generalized tutors. While they claim to personalize your education, any of their staff could be used to tutor you. I’m sure they have people who are specialized in math and english, but overall they focus on broad education and teaching someone to study properly. However, Sylvan did have one aspect of their site a welcome surprise. They did place focus on the family, and have resources devoted to family learning. As an educator myself, I know that many students’ achievement starts at home.
The problems within the current tutoring market are numerous. Some sites offer only generalized tutoring, while others offer only a limited yet highly focused subject areas. Every business I surveyed appears to only deal with primary and secondary students, completely ignoring the collegiate level. Additionally, what if I need help in an AP class, or in music theory, japanese history, building a toothpick bridge, or learning Hebrew? People who are in need of getting help in a more specific or specialized subject are literally up a creek without a paddle. This is where Fourth Logic comes in. If you’ve been looking over this site you’ll notice on our home page that we are an online tutoring site. We are presently focusing on completing our software behind the site and then we’ll be up and running. Specifically, our goal is to connect a student with a tutor who is specialized in any area they imaginable. Regardless whether you need help in understanding Schenkerian Harmony, or Shakespeare, Fourth Logic hopes to provide that avenue for learning.
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[...] Fourth Logic was started with an idea. We noticed that something was missing in education, an aspect that would be hard-pressed to easily fill. We recognized that online tutoring companies were limited in their scope and performance. Recently, these companies have discovered that they are focusing on broad generalized tutoring and have begun to focus (and rightly so) on specific core areas. While this is good progress for the most part, they have made this switch at the expense of other academic areas. This led me a few months back to write the article “Q: What What About the Rest of Us? A: Fourth Logic.“ [...]