Kshama Ravindran, mathematics teacher, joined an online tutoring group after teaching became a hassle, with her family shifting to a new place every few years.
“My husband gets transferred routinely, and continuing teaching was becoming difficult. Online tutoring provided me with the opportunity to do what I loved — teaching and interacting with students — while working from home,” she says.
Ms. Ravindran taught in schools for over eight years before becoming an online tutor for Tutorvista in 2006. “Initially, I missed the experience of teaching in front of a class, but slowly the positives of teaching online outweighed all its negatives.”
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Work from home
Allowing one-on-one interactions with students and a work-from-home model, online teaching has proved to be a viable option for practising teachers. The website Tutorvista, for example, has more than 27,000 students who subscribe to its various packages and are tutored by nearly 2,000 teachers across the country.
Take Karthik Govindan for instance. Being physically disabled, getting employment in a nine-to-five teaching job was difficult, but online tutoring provided him with an opportunity to pursue his love for teaching.
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A special knack
However, teaching online throws up its share of problems, such as not being able to see the pupil. But tutors seemed to have devised their own ways to get over this. Says Arijit Mitra, “The tutor develops a knack to sense what the student is up to. Pauses in speech, tone and other oral cues can tell if a student is distracted or not.”