Introducing Tutorfairs Online Classroom

Introducing Tutorfair's Online Classroom As Head of Operations at Tutorfair, I get to be involved with lots of really exciting projects that help both tutors and clients get the most out of the platform. Our big project in the second half of 2018 has been developing Tutorfair’s online classroom, an online learning platform! Why did we want to provide an online classroom for Tutorfair users? On Tutorfair, more lessons than ever before are online - making up to 50% of Tutorfair lessons, on some days! Many tutors enjoy the online lesson format, finding it as engaging as in-person lessons, and now, more and more students are also opting for the online learning experience. We know that at the moment, our tutors and students use a mixture of online platforms and teaching resources, such as Zoom, Skype, and bitpaper.io, to conduct lessons. With this in mind, we wanted to provide tutors and students with a resource to make online learning even easier and more effective, which is why we’ve been working on the Tutorfair online classroom. Tutorfair’s online classroom is an e-learning platform available and free to use for Tutorfair’s tutors and students. It features a variety of teaching tools and will be easily accessible for lessons directly through your Tutorfair account. What have we done? After lots of research with our development team, we have chosen a fantastic, versatile online classroom to integrate into the Tutorfair website. It was chosen because it has all the features tutors told us they would need to conduct great lessons online - and all in one place! Since integrating the classroom, we have run pilot tests with some fantastic tutors (thanks for the help guys!) and collected LOTS of feedback. We have since been working on improving the classroom experience for all users. What’s new and exciting the classroom? The online classroom is specifically designed to enhance the experience of online learning.  It has a range of teaching tools and features that will help tutors conduct engaging lessons for students. These include: Video, audio and chat facilities A whiteboard to draw on The ability to incorporate documents, images and videos onto the whiteboard Screenshare Learning tools such as Wolfram Alpha and LaTeX tool The work done in the classroom can be saved as images straight to the user’s computer. What’s great is that both the tutor and student will be able to access the classroom directly from their Tutorfair account - either from their messages, or lessons/bookings pages. How we are moving forward We’ve had some really lovely feedback from our pilot tutors so far! Katherine was very excited about all of the features of the classroom. She particularly liked the whiteboard, the video embed feature, the screenshare and the ability to upload pictures/documents and write on them. Luke, a Science and Maths tutor, really likes the Wolfram Alpha feature. He considers this to be a big advantage to the classroom and says that things will be much easier. Juliette observed that the classroom is very user-friendly and thinks it’s a great piece of technology! With the feedback collected from our pilot period, we’re implementing some small changes to improve the online classroom experience. The one big project we’re working on is being able to provide a lesson recording, so that tutors and students can go back and watch/listen to their lesson. In the meantime, we’re inviting tutors to get in touch if they would like to trial the classroom. Just send us an email to support@tutorfair.com! The online classroom is an incredibly exciting project that is giving us lots of scope for future development, so if you would like to be kept updated, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.