Online Tutoring Companies
Support for your learners between live lessons.
An AI tutor taught from your own course materials keeps learners practising between sessions, and gives your tutors a summary to pick up from.
The challenge
Learning happens between lessons too.
Live tutoring time is limited, and learners practise alone in between. Tutoring companies need support for those hours that teaches the way their tutors do, and a record their tutors can act on.
How tutoring companies use it
Three learning modes for between-lesson support
Tutoring companies use Adaptive Learning, Oral Examiner and Socratic Partner for practice, exam rehearsal and deeper thinking.
- Adaptive Learning learning mode
Practice between live lessons
Learners keep working between sessions. The tutor adapts to each one, sets worksheets from your course materials and marks the answers.
Learner: I finished the homework but I'm not sure I did question 3 right.
Tutor: Talk me through how you started question 3. What did you do first, and why?
Illustration with synthetic data. - Oral Examiner learning mode
Exam and interview practice
A formal practice examiner asks one question at a time, judges each answer and gives a progress review every five answers.
Learner: Photosynthesis makes glucose from sunlight.
Tutor: Examiner judgement: partial. Correction target: name the reactants. Follow-up question: what two substances does the plant combine?
Illustration with synthetic data. - Socratic Partner learning mode
Deeper thinking for able learners
Questions only: the tutor probes assumptions and asks the learner to justify each claim.
Learner: The poem is about loss.
Tutor: Which line first made you think that, and what in its wording suggests loss?
Illustration with synthetic data.
What you get
Built around your tutors and your courses
Your materials in, a summary for your tutors out, with your data kept separate.
Your course materials
The tutor teaches from your own courses and resources, loaded as rulebooks, not from the open internet.
How rulebooks workSummaries your tutors can use
After each session, the person you choose receives the main topics, strengths, difficulties and next steps.
See a sample summaryProgress you can discuss
Turn-by-turn scores and each learner's change from first to latest session, for progress conversations.
Learning analyticsYour own organisation
Your company is set up separately, with its own settings, rulebooks, sessions and analytics.
Trust centre
From a teacher
What a Charterhouse Online teacher says
…this has been created by a subject expert and will therefore be able to provide much more accurate feedback and insight.
Research
Why one-to-one tutoring matters
These are studies of tutoring in general, mostly with human tutors. They did not test Nested Learning.
Bloom (1984), The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring. Educational Researcher 13(6), 4–16.
Pupils tutored one-to-one, with regular checks and corrective feedback, scored about two standard deviations above pupils taught in a conventional class of about 30. The average tutored pupil did better than 98% of the class.
What it does not show: Small, short studies with school pupils. Later reviews found a smaller effect for human tutoring (VanLehn, 2011). Not a study of AI or of Nested Learning.
Read the source: The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One TutoringVanLehn (2011), The relative effectiveness of human tutoring, intelligent tutoring systems, and other tutoring systems. Educational Psychologist 46(4), 197–221.
Human tutoring raised scores by about 0.79 standard deviations over no tutoring, well below two. Computer tutors that give feedback on each step of a problem came close, at about 0.76.
What it does not show: Mostly science, maths and technology, and older than today's AI. Not a study of Nested Learning.
Read the source: The relative effectiveness of human tutoring, intelligent tutoring systems, and other tutoring systemsQuestions
Questions from tutoring companies
How can an online tutoring company use an AI tutor?
As support between live lessons. Learners practise with an AI tutor taught from your own course materials, and your human tutors receive a summary of each session to pick up from in the next lesson.
Is our content and learner data kept separate from other companies?
Yes. Each company is set up as its own organisation, with its own settings, rulebooks, sessions and analytics. No organisation can see another's.
Can we show customers the progress their learners make?
The analytics show each learner's scores turn by turn and their change from first to latest session, which you can use in progress conversations. We do not publish outcome figures for Nested Learning itself.