Exclusive: Online education booms during pandemic as MyTutor’s userbase grows by 170 per cent
Pearson, the world’s biggest educational publisher, reported an increase of 5 per cent in revenue in the first quarter.
This jump follows a shift towards digital, due to the boom in online learning that the pandemic caused. As businesses recover from the initial disruption from Covid-19, many have moved aspects of their offering online in a bid to retain some revenue.
One such company who has benefited from the shift to e-learning is online tutoring platform MyTutor, sharing with Morning Wire that the platform has experienced a 170 per cent increase in tutees as schools closed last year, with the first day of lockdown seeing the second highest amount of new customers.
In an attempt to level the educational playing field in light of the blatant disparities between children learning from home in the past year, MyTutor offered a range of different resources.
EdTech
While EdTech has not solved the problem entirely, it has assisted with making learning more widely accessible and has provided a driving force for positive change in the education space.
Bertie Hubbard, co-founder of MyTutor, told Morning Wire the edtech space has been given a major boost as a result of the pandemic. Moreover, there are no geographical restrictions or limitations.
“Because it’s online, kids get access to amazing tutors from across the country, rather than whoever’s nearby,” Hubbard said. “As there’s no travel for the student or the tutors, it also saves time and money travelling.”
Moreover, technology is providing education institutions and edtech firms with an opportunity to offer learning experiences at a scale not possible offline.
“Tutors learn from each other in their online community, and they have access to online training built by teachers,” he said, adding that, rather than replacing teachers with robots, the biggest power of EdTech lies in enhancing person-to-person learning.
“The emotional impact on kids is huge – they love learning from ‘cool’ older role models, and 88 per cent of students experience a boost in their self-confidence as a result,” Hubbard noted.
Finally, “we know it works academically too – students improve, on average, by a whole grade (often more) in a term’s worth of lessons,” he said, concluding that “as we continue to develop our technology we can automate some manual processes such as tutor matching, scheduling lessons and planning lesson content, all the while keeping personal human interaction at the core of online learning.”