Legitimate Online Tutoring Jobs Summary
Many people make a living out of tutoring and helping others with their studies. A tutor used to visit the student’s home for the study sessions. By applying to legitimate online tutoring jobs, a tutor may not need to leave his house and still help students in their studies.
These online teaching jobs allow students from any level to get learning support from people with a passion and the goal to teach. Learning support could be about any subject, topic or interest, such as learning English online.
Duties and Responsibilities
An online tutor provides learning help to students for subjects or areas where they need to improve on. A tutor may also help a student develop some skills to study independently. Monitoring and assessing a student’s progress is another duty of an online tutor.
If you work as an online tutor, you might need to communicate with the parents, guardians or the tutoring company you work for regarding the progress and other related concerns of your students. You might also need to prepare some report about your students.
The variation in online tutoring duties may vary on the level of your students (such as K-12, college, and postgraduate), subject you are teaching, and the organization you work for. For example, if you work for companies that have contracts with school districts, you will probably need to perform some student assessment tasks. If you work as a tutor to help kids with their assignments, you will only need to teach what the homework involves. If you are a subject tutor, your job is to help a student learn about that subject better so you will need to look for activities and materials that will help achieve this goal.
Academic Qualifications and Work Experience
This will depend on what educational level a company or a client requires. Companies that offer online tutoring services hire people with specific college degrees or courses to fit the subjects they will teach. There are some companies that welcome college undergraduates.
Still, there are some companies that require their online tutors to have significant years of teaching in a traditional classroom or online.
Figure 1
Figure 1 is from aim4a.com or Aim Academics. This company requires an applying online tutor to have at least a bachelor’s degree in the subject he wants to teach.
Skills and Attributes
To succeed as an online tutor, you must have the passion to teach (as listed in Figure 1). This comes with good interpersonal skills so you could connect with your students. The job also calls for good communication skills to relay (written and verbal) information effectively to your students. You can also read from Figure 1 that the online tutor needs to communicate excellently in English.
Like other online jobs such as email marketing and web search evaluation, you will do your work via the internet so you need to possess good technological skills. You need to know how to make the most out of the available online tools and technological gadgets involved in the job.Tools and Other Requirements
Since this is a job you will do via the internet, it means that you need a computer and an internet connection for fulfilling your duties. The company or client may provide the exact computer and internet specifications along with other requirements. To converse or communicate with your students, you need a web camera and a headset.
If you work for a particular online tutoring company, it might have a particular platform you can use to communicate with the students. If there is none, you need a video call app such as Skype. You might also need a digital tablet and a pen (instead of a mouse) to facilitate your tutorial sessions for subjects like mathematics.
The same with teaching English online, you must set up your home work space in an area or a room in your house where there is virtually no audio or visual distractions. You need a clutter free or white background.
Age
This is a job that requires you to at least be of minimum working age of 18 years old. Figure 2 shows this age requirement.
Figure 2
This is the age requirement at TutorMe. Other online tutoring jobs and companies might have a different age requirement so read the crucial details of each website and company. This example also shows other requirements to meet if you want to work with the company.
How To Apply/Join
You may find online tutor job openings online using search engines and job portals. There are companies contracted by the school districts for providing online tutoring to its students. Thus, you may search the internet using search engines like Google to look for these companies if you want to apply an online subject tutor. Our previous examples mentioned two of these companies, Aim4A and TutorMe.
This video briefly talks about the websites you could check out for online tutoring jobs
Before you send your application to these companies, make sure you have read a considerable amount of information about a particular company. You may find the information you need on the FAQ page of its website. It will also help you have a better insight about that company if you search for and read third party reviews about it.
These FAQ pages and the online job advertisements will provide you with the steps or procedures of application. Looking back to Figure 1, the application process for Aim4A starts by emailing your resume. In your email, you need to tell about the reason you have for considering online tutoring jobs. You should also include your salary expectations, Skype user name and work hours in USA EST time.
You may find online tutoring websites wherein you could advertise your personal teaching skills and set your rate. Such websites might not assign you your students. Instead, you will wait for students to book a session with you if they like your skill sets and your hourly rate.
Potential Income
The salary of an online tutor varies for each company he works for. Thus, it will help you make an informed decision if you will first read reviews before sending your application. Reviews from other people who have worked for that company will let you know not only about the payment but also about other job concerns like benefits and work hours.
Figure 3
This is from Preply. Here, you could set the hourly rate you want to charge. This is an example of what we mentioned in the previous discussion on how to apply. This is a website where you will advertise yourself as an online tutor.
If a student likes your area of specialization and your hourly rate, the student will book a session with you. On Preply, online tutors could earn up to $550 in one week. You might find this low compared to other online tutor platforms because Preply takes a commission from every lesson and session.
It will take 100% commission for the first lesson with every new student. For subsequent lessons with that student, Preply will take 18-33% commission. The more lessons or sessions a particular student books with you, the lower the commission Preply will collect. They credit a tutor with the rate he will receive based on the hourly rate and the number of hours a student booked for. Payments go to a tutor’s Preply wallet, which he can withdraw via Skrill, Payoneer, or PayPal.
Figure 4
Here's another example from TutorMe. On its Help Center pages, you could read that it pays tutors at least $16 for every hour spent on lessons with students. They apply this hourly rate to the precise number of accumulated hours within a week. It implements a courtesy duration of at least 5 minutes. This means that a tutor will not receive any payment if he connects with a student for just 2 minutes. To receive proper credits, a tutor must spend at least 5 minutes with a student so that his time will get proper credits according to the $16 hourly rate. PayPal is the method used to send payments.
Work Schedule
Work schedule of online tutors may vary, but it will depend on when the students are available. From Figure 1, the work hours of an online tutor for Aim4A are within the time zones of students in Australia, North America and Europe.
Figure 5
This example is from Tutor.com. This company lets you create a schedule that will fit you. It offers 24/7 online tutoring services.
Benefits / Bonus/ Increase/ Training Provided
The training you might get from an online tutoring company might cover how to get around the tutoring platform used by that company.
Figure 6
As for the benefits, online research and further reading will also allow you to find a company that offers the best benefits and perks. Figure 6 is from K12.com and the benefits you could get if you work as an online tutor here includes medical, dental, and 401(k) benefits.
Conclusion
PROS
CONS
I think these online tutoring jobs are worthwhile careers to consider. If you have the heart to teach and help others learn (and you pass the requirements), just set up a decent work space at home with a fast and reliable internet connection. You may start gaining online tutoring experience by working for online companies. Later on, you could consider setting up your own tutoring business or working as a freelance online tutor.