After being in development for over a year, it is with great pleasure that I announce that my start-up company: Tutor With Me, has officially opened to the public!

Some background

In 2011, Tutor With Me was founded by four Concordia students with the intended mission of offering a powerful community medium for online tutoring and learning which primarily targets higher education. The company’s approach is to tackle online tutoring by building off the idea that everyone has knowledge to share and that tutoring and getting tutored should be an easy and meaningful process. To this effect, Tutor With Me has created an open community model of tutoring where any member has the option to join online sessions and learn or take on a tutor role and offer sessions at their own rates. All tutoring sessions take place in a lightweight virtual classroom platform that is developed to include tools for videoconferencing, file sharing and presentation.

What we do

Tutor With Me’s mission:

More specifically however, at the time of this posting, we offer the following:

• Online Tutoring: Learners can seek out tutors and learn online through a virtual classroom environment.
• Free Peer Sessions: Peer Sessions can be created freely by anyone. The goal of such sessions is to encourage peer collaboration through the virtual classroom environment in the form of: study groups, and project collaboration.

The future

Now that we’ve launched, it would be nice to take a long deserving vacation however, many challenges are still to come. As of last weekend, we’ve began putting into action the first phase of our marketing campaign which includes: leveraging social media outlets, and cold calling known tutors across Canada and the US. Marketing aside, we have some big plans for the future (though, time frames have yet to be determined). Such plans include but are not limited to:

• Resource Centre: This component will look to complement our tutoring services by offering a repository of useful resources for tutors and students to use. These resources will include approved test banks, assignments, and study guides for a wide range of topics ranging from academia to self-improvement. Tutors and students will have the capability of rating any resource and adding new ones in an effort to build a community of open resources that will be freely accessible by anyone.
• Enhanced Virtual Classroom: We take a lot of pride in the virtual classroom environment we built from the ground up, however, what we have put together is far from a finished product. In the near future, the environment will be upgraded to include: file sharing, presentation modes, better component management, more presenter/tutor controls, support for Math functions and text rendering integrated within the whiteboard, multiple whiteboard tabs, and much more.
• Live Questions: Are you working on an assignment and stuck on a problem you just cannot seem to figure out? The idea behind ‘Live Questions’ is to give learners the opportunity to ask a question and welcome online tutors to help them derive a solution (essentially supporting the idea of Just-In-Time Learning). Learners will have the ability to set a price for how much they would be willing to pay a tutor for quick help. If willing, a tutor will have the option to assist free of charge.

Read the official Beta Launch statement from Tutor With Me’s CEO, Andrew Pitsiladis.

If you are interested in checking Tutor With Me out, visit: http://tutorwith.me. Your feedback is appreciated.

Cheers!