Cross-age tutoring is a method of tutoring in which older students help younger students learn. A recent meta-analysis of various types of cross-age tutoring interventions saw a positive impact for both those who received tutoring and the tutors themselves. In fact, the tutors actually saw slightly more improvement in their reading skills.

The study, Examining the Academic Effects of Cross-age Tutoring: A Meta-analysis, was published in Educational Psychology Review in March. This study puts forth further evidence that cross-age tutoring is a cost-effective method to provide meaningful improvements for students, say two of its coauthors, Elizabeth Swanson and Andrew Chang.

Cross-Age Tutoring Research

Cross-age tutoring has long been supported by research, but it had been nearly a decade since a meta-analysis had been conducted on the intervention's overall impact. And previous research did not always look at the impact of the intervention on the tutors themselves.

For this study, researchers looked at 32 studies with more than 4,500 participants combined. This allowed them to examine the impact of cross-age tutoring in a wide range of contexts.

“We looked at factors like tutor type, like older student versus adult volunteers or number of tutoring sessions, or a tutor who has learning difficulties versus a typically developing tutor, and subject area, like reading versus math. Surprisingly, none of these factors significantly changes the result,” says Chang, a Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt University. “Cross-age tutoring was helpful across different situations, whether there were many or few sessions, or whether tutors were older students or adult volunteers, whether tutors were struggling learners or typically developing learners, or whether the subject was reading or math.”

Swanson, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin with a primary appointment with The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, notes there are several big implications of these findings. “Kids are doing just as well tutoring as adults,” she says. “That's kind of a big deal.”

She adds the benefit seen for the tutors is also significant. “Think about the third through fifth grader who may be struggling a little bit with reading, but they can deliver a first-grade reading intervention. I mean, the fact that they also benefit, to put it colloquially, is a great bang for your buck.”

Further Cross-Age Tutoring Research

In addition to this meta-analysis, researchers headed by Swanson are working on a large randomized control study of cross-age tutoring interventions conducted after school at more than 60 YMCAs and involving hundreds of students.

For this study, students are split into three groups: A group receiving tutoring from adults; a group receiving cross-age tutoring; and a third group receiving no intervention.

So far, this study’s findings are similar to what is expected from the meta-analysis, with a similarly positive impact seen from adult- and student-led tutors.

“Our early analysis indicates that these two treatment groups are performing equally well,” Swanson says.

Both students and adults use the same instructional materials, and Swanson’s team records sessions.

“We listen to these recordings, and we score them; we say, ‘How close are you to the intervention as it was designed?’” Swanson says. “These kids are reaching equal levels to adults in delivery and alignment to the intervention, so they can deliver the intervention just as well as an adult, sometimes better.”

Cross-Age Tutoring Takeaways For Educators

Educators shouldn’t view cross-age tutoring as a silver bullet, but it is a cost-effective intervention, say Swanson and Chang.

“It should not be the only intervention that young children receive in reading, but it could be added with not much time and no extra cost,” Swanson says.

She adds it’s an intervention that does not need to be limited to schools. “Think about after-school care providers and their role in reading and math intervention and improving academic outcomes,” she says. Her work with YMCA after-school programs suggests these types of programs can help support academics.

Chang adds that there’s a lot to be enthusiastic about in the findings of the new meta-analysis.

“This is good news for schools," he says. "It shows that cross-age tutoring can work in various settings with different kinds of students and subjects, and it gives teachers and school leaders the flexibility to adopt a program to their own context without worrying too much about specific conditions.”

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ChatGPT and other AI chatbots have become almost synonymous with conversations about education and edtech tools. But there’s an important question that so far remains unanswered: Do AI chatbots help students learn? 

“Many empirical studies have been devoted to exploring the effects of AI chatbots on students’ learning outcomes. However, the findings from these studies were inconsistent,” says Yu Zhonggen, a professor of Foreign Studies at the Beijing Language and Culture University. 

Some studies comparing students who learned with ChatGPT or other AI chatbots to students who didn't found a positive impact while others saw no effect. To try to understand these different findings, Zhonggen and colleagues researched all existing empirical studies — studies based on observed and measured phenomena — that looked at AI chatbots in education interventions from K-12 to college. 

Ultimately, they found 24 appropriate studies and pooled the results together to answer a number of questions about ChatGPT-style chatbots and the impact on teaching and learning. The team’s findings were published in the British Journal of Educational Technology. 

“Overall, the study found that AI chatbots had a significant positive effect on students’ learning outcomes,” Zhonggen says. “Specifically, AI chatbots were found to enhance students’ learning motivation, performance, self-efficacy, interests, and perceived value of learning. Additionally, AI chatbots could be helpful in alleviating students’ anxiety.” 

However, there were limitations. These positive impacts were only seen in college students, with younger grade levels not seeing statistically significant improvement. Also, the longer a ChatGPT intervention went, the less effective it was. 

Why Were AI Chatbots More Impactful for College Students? 

Compared to other age groups, primary school students may not always have an effective interaction with AI chatbots due to lower language competency, self-directed learning ability, and digital literacy, says Zhonggen. 

“They relied more on teachers’ guidance, which made it difficult for them to fully engage with learning through AI chatbots,” he says. “Secondary school students received more academic pressure from their parents and schools for good exam results. High academic pressure decreased their motivation to use AI chatbots for learning. By contrast, university students may be more proactive and capable of self-regulating their learning.”  

Why Did The Impact Change Over Time?

The first time a student uses ChatGPT or a similar AI chatbot, there is a wow factor that seems to impact learning, except this novelty effect might wear off over time, rendering ChatGPT-style chatbots less effective. 

“In the short interventions, students were excited and intrigued by the use of AI chatbots, which temporarily increased their learning interest, motivation, and performance,” Zhonggen says. “Once the novelty effect of AI chatbots has worn off, it would probably be difficult for students to sustain learning interests, have motivation, and perform well in chatbot-based learning.” 

Other potential barriers to the sustained use of ChatGPT or similar tools exist. “Students were more likely to experience information overload when using AI chatbots for a long time,” Zhonggen says. “This may distract them from chatbot-supported learning, leading to poor learning performance.” 

Future Research Implications  

More research has to be done to identify the most effective interventions using AI chatbots as well as exactly why the tools may not be successful with younger students and why efficacy decreases over time. However, Zhonggen says the evidence is mounting in support of ChatGPT’s efficacy, particularly in higher education. 

“When we wrote this paper, few empirical studies had explored the effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning outcomes,” Zhonggen says. Since he and his co-authors performed their literature review, there have been several new studies suggesting a benefit for ChatGPT with college students. “For example, through using ChatGPT for seven weeks, [one study found] there were significant improvements in university students’ self-efficacy, thinking skills, and motivation.” 

As always, more research is needed, Zhonggen says. “We still call for more scholars to pay attention to the role of ChatGPT in different subject disciplines.” 

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Artificial intelligence has long been built into education apps but recent advances in large language models that power the popular ChatGPT have opened the door to a next-generation digital tutor that can interact with students and respond to their questions on an individual basis. 

Previous generations of AI technology might tailor preexisting questions and examples to a student’s perceived skill level in math, but rather than merely curating existing content, large language models can generate new answers and examples in response to queries from learners. 

“The thing about generative AI that is so different from past AI is it is designed to be creative,” says Gillian Hayes, dean of the graduate division at the University of California Irvine and co-head of the CERES edtech research initiative. “If you ask it a question, you're going to get one answer. If you asked the exact same question again, you're going to get a different answer.” 

This creativity is what makes AI tutors so spectacular and potentially beneficial to educators. ChatGPT-style tools can provide real-time, on-demand coaching for students, generating new differentiated examples with the click of a button. 

However, AI still generates inaccurate responses and we don’t quite know what the impact on anyone is, no less children, of interacting with something that seems so human but is certainly not human. 

Potential Benefits of AI Tutors 

Khan Academy has partnered with OpenAI, the developer behind ChatGPT, to utilize the most advanced version of its AI technology GPT-4 to power digital tutors on their respective platforms. Sal Khan told T&L that while he hadn’t been convinced previous versions of the technology were good enough to serve as a tutor, GPT-4 sold him. “It was able to do things that seemed like science fiction before that, like drive a nuanced conversation,” Khan said. “I actually think that 4, if it's prompted right, feels like it passes the Turing Test. It really feels like a caring human on the other side.”

Khan is using GPT-4 to power Khanmigo, an interactive learning assistant that is being piloted to select students and educators on the Khan Academy platform. 

The language learning app Duolingo now uses GPT-4 to power multiple features available to Duolingo Max subscribers. One GPT-4 feature will explain answers to a student generating unlimited explanations and examples on demand. Another allows learners to have a simulated conversation in the language they are learning – the digital tutor’s prompts are both spoken and written, and the learner can speak or type their responses.  

“Both these features are a great step toward our vision or dream of allowing Duolingo Max to be more like a human tutor in your pocket,” says Edwin Bodge, Senior Product Manager at Duolingo. 

GPT technology is also being used to power other learning apps and other similar AI models will likely be incorporated into more and more learning tools. Philip Oreopoulos, professor of economics at the University of Toronto, who has studied the impact of traditional human tutoring, is optimistic about the new era of AI tutors. Prior to the launch of Khanmigo, Oreopoulos had been interested in existing tools from Khan Academy to simulate human tutoring. “The only problem is that students just don't like to do it on their own,” he says. 

Over the last two years, Oreopoulos has been working with colleagues to explore how teachers might use Khan Academy more effectively. He believes Khanmigo could jumpstart these efforts. “You can have it beside you while you're going through a problem and it says all the things that you would want a good tutor to be saying,” he says. 

However, the technology is still not perfect. Khanmigo is currently text-based, which is not a natural way for younger students to communicate, Oreopoulos says. “The potential is there and it’s not a big stretch to kind of see where it could go,” he says. “These little details have to be worked out and that's where the research comes in. A lot of education technology is getting ahead of the research and so we don't have a good sense of which things work best.”

Potential Pitfalls of AI Tutors 

The unknown questions about the technology are the heart of concerns surrounding AI tutors. 

“Despite the many years of really interesting research and the sort of leaps and bounds that we've taken in generative AI recently, my biggest concern with any edtech is that I just don't think we have the level of evidence yet to really know how good these things are,” Hayes says. “We haven't done the kind of large-scale trials that you would see in the pharmaceutical industry to really understand how does AI tutoring do compared to human tutoring in terms of learning outcomes, student engagement, student well-being, and any of the things that you might care about and want to measure in kids.” 

Hayes is concerned about biases that are inherently built into complex AI models because these models reflect the biases in society. Though she believes generative AI tools will ultimately increase educational opportunities, there may be questions around equity in the short term. For instance, most access to GPT-4 at this time is subscription-based, which limits its audience. 

Another prime concern around AI tutors is the well-publicized tendency to say inaccurate or offensive things. This issue is why Khan Academy has rolled out Khanmigo in pilot form first. 

“We feel like there's so much value here for educators and for students, and we just don't want bad things to happen that turn people sour on all the positive things. So that's why we're being very careful,” Khan said. Though, he added, when these tools do go off the rails it’s usually because people are actively trying to steer them there. 

The Duolingo team is also cognizant of this and uses a second AI model to monitor the GPT-4 enabled conversations in order to ensure the conversation doesn’t go off-topic, which could make the AI tutor more likely to say weird or offensive things, Bodge says. 

Ultimately, Hayes says these tools don’t have to be perfect to be helpful and she hopes that AI tutors will increase educational opportunities for all. “Personally, I think the large-scale democratization of these technologies is likely to help us but I tend to be optimistic about these things, and that hasn't always been [warranted] historically, so we'll see,” she says. 

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• High Dosage Tutoring

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The Biden-Harris Administration recently called on schools to implement high-quality tutoring to help students overcome learning disruptions caused by the COVID pandemic. 

The administration has urged schools to utilize the $122 billion in funding through the American Rescue Plan to launch high-quality tutoring, summer learning and enrichment, and afterschool programs. The administration has also launched the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS), which aims to provide students with an additional 250,000 tutors and mentors over the next three years.

Tutoring researchers were pleased by the attention the administration is giving to tutoring but advised school leaders to make sure to implement evidence-based tutoring interventions. 

What This Means for Tutoring  

Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of Education & Economics at Brown University who has studied tutoring extensively, says the administration’s public support of tutoring is a step in the right direction. “The federal government has a really important role to play in convening all the actors that are involved in this effort, in helping to support research that identifies best practices, and helping to fund these efforts,” he says. 

The Biden-Harris Administration announcement noted that, “Research has consistently shown that high-quality tutoring programs of a range of durations can produce about five months of additional learning,” and that the best programs “provide tutoring three times per week, for 30 minutes each day, and use teachers and well-trained volunteers.” 

Among the research cited for this initiative is a 2020 review of 100 studies conducted by Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab North America at MIT, which found that tutoring programs yield consistent and substantial positive impacts on learning outcomes. 

Vincent Quan, co-executive director of J-PAL North America and a co-author of the 2020 review, is pleased that the administration is giving tutoring this attention. “We conducted this review paper a couple of years ago, and really came to the conclusion after looking at all of these rigorous studies, that tutoring, when implemented effectively, has been shown to be a consistently successful strategy to help students catch up,” he says.

Potential Road Bumps  

Despite his overall support for the initiative, Kraft is concerned that developing a pool of up to 250,000 tutors is too focused on recruiting volunteers. “I think volunteers have a role to play, but I'm skeptical of efforts to scale tutoring that exclusively rely on volunteers,” he says. 

How tutoring will be funded long-term is also a concern. “One thing to note is that it's not new or additional funding on top of the existing ARP funding, it's support and direction for how to best leverage that existing funding,” Kraft says. “I think having a sustained program really will require substantial financial investments in a workforce that you pay competitive wages for that you compliment with other sources, like community volunteers, college work-study, and AmeriCorps members.” 

The J-PAL North American Review found that professional- or teacher-led tutoring programs tend to be more effective than volunteer- or parent-led tutoring programs, however, volunteer- and parent-led tutoring is still effective. “We suspect that [tutors in] professional-led tutoring programs have more robust training,” Quan says. 

Whether it utilizes volunteers or professionals, a successful tutoring program requires support and resources. “There are considerations related to recruitment of tutors, training of tutors, how do you structure a school day to actually have a tutoring session built-in,” Quan says. “If those types of more nitty-gritty operational details are not being considered, there's a high probability that these programs are not going to be implemented well, and they're not going to live up to their promise.” 

Other Questions and Challenges with Tutoring Implementation  

While there is a great deal of research supporting the efficacy of in-person, high-frequency tutoring, there is less research on the potential technology can play in tutoring. Artificial intelligence programs that can respond to students’ learning needs as well as virtual tutoring and on-demand tutoring may work but are not as well-studied as in-person tutoring, Quan says. “We would really encourage people to continue to experiment and evaluate these types of programs, so we know later on if these types of initiatives have been making a difference,” he says. 

In addition to tutoring, the Biden-Harris Administration’s initiative focuses on afterschool and summer programs, which historically have been more difficult to implement. “There's no doubt that those can be impactful and meaningful for kids, but I think that is a harder thing to do well, and the research really shows quite mixed results,” Kraft says. “Our mental framework about what we want to spend our time doing after school or during the summer changes, and I think it's really a more of an uphill battle to do core academic work in those settings. So I would hope that most of the emphasis here lands on integrating tutoring and mentoring into the school day.” 

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High dosage online tutoring is an increasingly popular intervention at schools across the U.S. Proponents hope it can increase student access to tutoring and help overcome pandemic disruptions to learning. 

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said recently that students who have fallen behind during the pandemic should receive 90 minutes of high-quality tutoring each week and a recent analysis from Burbio showed that approximately one-third of districts plan to spend relief funds on tutoring. 

While in-person high-dosage tutoring has been shown to improve student learning in multiple studies, the extent that this translates to online tutoring is not as well researched. However, a recent pilot study of online tutoring in which college students volunteered as tutors and were paired with middle school students in Illinois found consistently positive effects of online tutoring on student achievement, though these effects were smaller than had been seen for in-person tutoring. 

Matthew Kraft, a co-author of the study and associate professor of Education & Economics at Brown University, shared the following five tips for school leaders on how best to implement online tutoring in accordance with the best evidence currently available. However, he stressed more research is necessary and there is no one-size-fits-all “magic formula.”

1 - Have Consistent Tutors and Frequent Sessions Over A Long Period in Online Tutoring 

“It's advantageous to have tutoring be a sustained relationship between the same tutor and the same student,” Kraft says. “You want them to meet regularly, a couple of times a week, over a long period of time.

Part of what seems to make in-person tutoring so effective is the tutor-to-student relationship that forms in successful tutoring situations, so online tutoring programs should try and replicate that as much as possible. Some online tutoring providers have been criticized for not doing so and instead pairing students with different tutors each session. 

In addition to fostering a sustained relationship between the same student and tutor, the duration and frequency of tutoring sessions appear to be significant. “We hypothesize that the length of tutoring, the duration matters a lot, as well as the kind of weekly dosage,” Kraft says. 

2 - Have Online Tutoring Take Place During the School Day  

While some third-party online tutoring programs tout the 24/7 availability of tutors, Kraft advises focusing tutoring on the school day, which helps ensure equitable access to tutoring. “There's good reason to suspect that the types of tutoring programs that are on-demand and available for students to take advantage of [anytime] might benefit those students who are already doing fairly well in school because they may be more able and more confident in their ability to call someone up and say, ‘I've got a specific question. I know I'm confused,’” Kraft says. “That might be beneficial. It likely is, but it would potentially have inequitable consequences for student outcomes with the students who most need individualized instruction and support and are least willing and able to take advantage of those additional services.” 

3 - Give Online Tutors Ongoing Training  

“You want to find an opportunity to support tutors through professional development, and ongoing on-the-job learning,” Kraft says. “You want to scaffold or work with high-quality instructional materials that, ideally, are aligned with the instruction that students are receiving during their traditional classes.”

While in a perfect world professional tutors might be the best option, they may not always be necessary. Part of what is so encouraging about Kraft and his colleagues’ recent research is that it was a low-cost model utilizing college student volunteers as tutors. 

4- Make Sure Terminology Around Online Tutoring Is Defined  

Many companies offer online tutoring to districts but since the terminology around tutoring is not universally agreed upon misunderstandings can occur. 

“I would be wary of an online tutoring program that says, 'We offer high-dosage tutoring,'  without explaining exactly what they think that means and how they're delivering it,” Kraft says. “High-dosage tutoring has become a buzzword that I think is often used to describe very different models of tutoring.” 

Kraft’s says high-quality, high-dosage tutoring programs tend to include the following characteristics:

• high-dosage delivery (i.e., three or more sessions per week of required tutoring);
• a stated focus on cultivating tutor-student relationships;
• use of formative assessments to monitor student learning;
• alignment with the school curriculum; 
• formalized tutor training and support.

5 - Be Realistic About Online Tutoring’s Potential  

Kraft says school leaders and other education stakeholders should be clear-eyed about online tutoring’s potential and the results of the study he and his colleagues conducted. 

“It's encouraging because, despite the fact that this was a pilot program, during the height of some of the most challenging times of this pandemic, we found positive and meaningful estimates,” he says. But there’s also the reason for caution because these improvements, “were not as large as many of the effects we saw in prior studies of in-person tutoring before the pandemic.” 

There are also challenges to implementing online tutoring at the scale that is likely necessary, especially given the labor shortage that already exists within education. “We learned there's a lot of potential for online tutoring,” Kraft says. “But at the same time, we also see that we can't expect the moon and the stars and there are challenges that exist to implementing high-quality, high-dosage tutoring.” 

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Learning loss has not been as significant as feared within the North Shore School District 112 in Highland Park, Illinois, although COVID disruption has still been felt. Prior to March 2020, the district, in which 25 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, was making positive strides toward closing the achievement gap, but those have not continued through the pandemic year. 

“We are very concerned that we're not making progress this year,” says Superintendent Michael Lubelfeld. 

To get students gaining ground again, the district has launched a pilot online high-dosage tutoring program at two of its Title I schools. About 70 students from third through fifth grade will be tutored in reading and math twice per week for 90 minutes total using FEV Tutor, a tutoring company that offers live, one-to-one tutoring online. 

If the program is as successful as expected, Lubelfeld says it will be expanded to more students as early as this summer. 

The North Shore School District is one of many throughout the country looking to utilize high-dosage online tutoring as a tool to get students back on track. It’s a strategy the research seems to support, though online tutoring could use further study experts say.

In-Person Tutoring 

A July 2020 review of 100 studies conducted by Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, North America at MIT, found “that tutoring programs yield consistent and substantial positive impacts on learning outcomes, with an overall pooled effect size estimate of 0.37 SD.” Vincent Quan, one of the study’s co-authors, says that 0.37 standard deviation “translates to a student moving from the 50th percentile and a distribution to nearly the 66th percentile.” 

Quan, the associate director of policy for Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, North America, adds that most of the study he and his co-authors looked at showed tutoring had a positive impact. “That's actually quite rare in education research, especially with randomized control trials. There's a common critique that randomized control trials of education interventions tend to find things that do not work but are less good at finding things that do work.” 

Other recent research has painted a similarly positive picture of in-person tutoring. 

But not all tutoring is equal. Quan’s review found that programs led by teachers or paraprofessionals, including school staff members and college students, tended to be more effective than volunteer or parent tutors. Tutoring was also most effective for students at younger grade levels, though older students also saw some benefits. Finally, tutoring was most effective when conducted during school hours rather than after hours. 

Online Tutoring

“Web-based video conferencing platforms and other types of technology have expanded the opportunity for tutoring,” says Matthew Kraft, associate professor of Education & Economics, at Brown University. “There's a much wider supply of potential tutors for a given kid because they can access tutors from all over the country and all over the world.” 

However, “We still don't know a lot about the efficacy of tutoring, when it's placed in an online remote context,” says Kraft. “There's some emerging evidence that suggests it can be effective, and certainly there's been a rapidly growing private sector of online tutoring over the last number of years that suggests that parents are willing to pay a lot of money for it, so it must be meaningful for those students and parents in some way. So I'm optimistic about the potential value of that.” 

A recent randomized control study of online tutoring during the pandemic looked at 1,059 middle school students in Italy. The 530 students who received online tutoring outperformed the control group who did not receive tutoring. Another randomized control study of 144 students at four low-income schools found students who received online tutoring outperformed those who did not. 

But more research is still needed to determine whether online tutoring can be scaled up and what the best practices are. “We still need to know a lot more about if tutors and students can develop strong relationships in that context,” Kraft says. “What are the ways in which you might be able to have a more integrated hybrid approach with some tutoring in person, some at a distance.”

The Future of Tutoring 

Federal and local education leaders should be aware of the potential of high-dosage tutoring to help students, says Quan. “In a field like education, where there is often so little consensus around what works, we actually do have a fair degree of confidence that tutoring, if implemented well and in adherence to some high-level design principles, can really move the needle in combating a lot of the learning loss that has been precipitated by COVID-19 and these widespread school closures,” he says. 

Federal funds are now available for tutoring, but Kraft worries that funding won’t lead to sustainable tutoring programs. 

“There's both a huge opportunity with the stimulus package and the funding that's coming to districts and a challenge,” he says. “I'm arguing the tutoring should be an approach to integrating individualized instruction in the public school day, and on a long-term and permanent basis, not a one-time ancillary, remedial approach to targeted support during the pandemic. But the funding we have has to be spent in a couple of years and it's gonna run out. And so how do you build a program that then you might not be able to fund and support through the long haul?” 

In a paper published in January, Kraft and co-author Grace Falken conducted a thought experiment to look at what scaling up tutoring might look like in the U.S. They estimated that a targeted approach to scaling school-wide tutoring nationally could focus on K-8 Title I schools and be accomplished for an annual cost of between $5 and $15 billion annually. 

Short of that lofty goal, Kraft hopes school districts will look to implement sustainable tutoring programs, while being aware of what tutoring can and cannot accomplish. 

“We're emerging from this crisis year, and I think we're hoping to find quick fixes. There are no quick fixes to the trauma and inequitable learning opportunities that have happened during the pandemic,” Kraft says. “Tutoring is a promising idea to integrate into a portfolio of approaches to support kids, but it's not a silver bullet. We need to frame tutoring much more about caring relationships between adults and kids that you add academics on top of, then just narrowly about academic acceleration. We need to meet the kids where they are, address their social and emotional learning needs, and then build on that.”

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Online tutoring and teaching has become a popular resource for students of any age to learn nearly any topic. It can be done at home on a computer or mobile device and is usually cheaper than traditional in-person tutoring. Students love the ability to view and choose courses that work for them.Teachers love the ability to earn extra money doing what they love, from the comfort of their own home— and on their own schedule.

*This list is in alphabetical order.

• BitDegree - Offers a wide variety of subjects to learn, including programming and coding. Educators can to make extra money by signing up as tutors.
• Chegg Tutors - A fantastic site where students can find a tutor in any subject, anytime 24/7.
• Classmill - A free site touting “Curated Learning” that lets participants create classes using links, videos, images, and more.
• Course Hero - A great homework help site where expert tutors specialize in their subjects and teach students with step-by-step instructions.
• eTutorworld - An excellent tutoring and test prep site where every session is recorded to help students revise and retain learning. Test prep includes SAT, PSAT, ACT, AP and many more.
• Happy Tutors - A free online community that connects tutors, students and parents. Tutors can pay a fee for extra exposure on Happy Tutors.
• Sophia - A polished site offering college credits where educators can share what they know via different teaching strategies such as blended instruction or flipped classroom
• Tutoo - A useful site allowing students to find either an online or local, in-person tutor.
• Tutor.com - One of the best and most popular places to go for online tutoring. Students can get help with any subject, including homework topics. The site features categories such as U.S. K-12 Schools, Military Families, Libraries and more. There are nice mobility features as well.
• Tutor Hub - A UK-based community where students can find answers to their questions or find an online tutor who sets their own rates.
• Tutor Hunt - This UK-based site is great for teachers interested in earning some extra money by tutoring online.
• WizIQ - Probably one of the most popular online sites for teaching/tutoring. There are different pricing plans available for students who take classes in a private virtual classroom. A free trial is offered.
• Wyzant - A fun place for students to find a tutor on any subject or for test preparation. Extensive FAQs and guidance offered for teachers/tutors.

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David Kapuler is an educational consultant with more than 10 years of experience working in the K-12 environment. For more information about his work, contact him at dkapuler@gmail.com and read his blog at cyber-kap.blogspot.com.