Creating Online Tutoring Marketplace in 2024: Custom Development or Readymade solution

The online learning industry is on a rapid rise and shows no signs of stopping or even slowing down. Research firms forecast that the global eLearning market will surpass 243 billion US dollars by 2022. Both businesses and academic institutions are increasingly investing in online learning as their preferred method of delivering knowledge and training to learners. The market has a multitude of online learning solutions that have become increasingly popular with the education sector as well as private companies.
And, considering the huge potential of the market, it is the ideal time for entrepreneurs to invest in an online tutoring marketplace. Now, whether you choose a ready-made online tutoring solution or custom development, continuous enhancements are needed to keep the platform up to date with the changing trends, user behaviours and industry practices.

Working of an Online Tutoring Marketplace and Revenue Model

The working of an online tutoring marketplace is similar to any other on-demand service business model. The platform has 3 different entities – admin, tutor, and learner. The standard workflow of an online tutoring platform is as follows:

• As soon as a tutor creates a profile on the platform, a profile creation request is sent to the admin for approval.
• After verifying all the necessary information, the admin approves/declines the request. If the profile is approved, it gets listed on the platform.
• Learners on the platform browse for the tutors as per their requirements. They can use various filters to narrow down their search.
• Learners can then pick a suitable tutor for themselves and check his/her availability to schedule a one-to-one or group session.
• Learner makes the payment, which is kept in the platform’s escrow account. After this, the session is booked and tutors and learners can attend it at the scheduled time.
• After the session is over, both the tutor and the learner have to mark it complete. Learners can also share their feedback/ratings on the platform.
• As soon as the session is marked complete by the tutor and learner, the system releases the lesson fee (adjusted with commission charges) from escrow to the tutor’s online wallet.

Revenue Channels

There are several revenue channels for online tutoring platforms. The revenue channels of an online tutoring business are as follows and these show how a tutoring marketplace can earn money.

• Commission: Commission from the payment made by the learners to attend the live sessions
• Subscription: Monthly/yearly subscriptions to the tutors as well as the learners to access special features/functionalities on the platform.
• Banner Ads: Banner ads on the website displayed by any third-party ad network service like Google AdSense.
• Featured Tutors: Invite tutors to get listed on the featured section of the website for increased visibility and booking requests.

Choosing Between Custom Development or Readymade Online Tutoring Software

Starting an online tutoring marketplace is now a highly profitable business considering the huge demand for online courses in different fields of education. As entrepreneurs are sure to start an online tutoring business, what puts them into a dilemma is — whether to go for a readymade online tutoring solution or for custom development of the platform The decision to choose between the two depends upon many factors; niche, type of audience, the intent of business, and so on.

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Custom Development:

This is considered to be the best way for businesses who want to launch a large-scale online tutoring platform as per their specific requirements.
This traditional way of developing a website requires you to take full ownership of the project. Every single part of the platform is coded from scratch for which a highly experienced team of developers is required. No doubt, it is more expensive and time-consuming, it enables you to implement any feature specific to your audience and niche.

Readymade solution:

There are several white label solutions available on the market that can be used to build online tutoring platforms like Verbling or Preply without a whole lot of investment and time. They do not require any coding knowledge; just a basic understanding of operating the platform is all that’s needed. These solutions are integrated with the most trending features to save much of the groundwork that goes into developing a fully-fledged platform. Most of the ready-made solutions are white-labeled and offer customization options to support a diverse set of business requirements and use-cases.

Yo!Coach is one such solution that offers all the aforementioned benefits.
They do not require any coding knowledge; just a basic understanding of operating the platform is all that’s needed. These solutions are integrated with the most trending features to save much of the groundwork that goes into developing a fully-fledged platform. Most of the ready-made solutions are white-labeled and offer customization options to support a diverse set of business requirements and use-cases. Yo!Coach is one such solution that offers all the aforementioned benefits.

Features to Consider While Choosing an Online Tutoring Software

The online tutoring industry has gone mainstream in a short span of time. This is an ideal time for edupreneurs to launch online tutoring platforms due to the high demand. However, before moving on, the business owners need to make sure that they are able to incorporate the trending and in-demand features into the platform. Below stated are some of the best features that are meant for online tutoring platforms.

• Video Chat Integration: Learners who need one-on-one attention or have questions will appreciate an online tutoring platform that includes a video conferencing feature. No doubt, chats, and emails cover most of the communication needs, video chat allows an effective learning approach between tutors and learners. It creates a virtual classroom atmosphere that paves the way for a dynamic learning space to facilitate both tutors and learners.
• Time-Zone Friendly: The different locations of the tutors and learners should not limit them from using an online tutoring platform. A platform supporting multiple time zones will enable the tutors and learners sitting in different time zones to coordinate easily through alerts and reminders. Also, users should be allowed to select their preferred language in the tutoring platform. Having content in his/her preferred language will help a user to have a more interactive and customized learning experience. The multi-currency feature also eliminates the barrier of location dependency. Users can change the currency and get the prices displayed as per their preference.
• Review/Ratings: Ratings and reviews allow learners to make an informed decision of selecting a tutor or a course. They act as indicators of teachers’ capabilities, their course material, and methodology. However, the admin should have control over whether or not the ratings and reviews are to be displayed to restrict the fake reviews. Also, the student should only be allowed to rate/review the teacher once he has completed the session.
• Secure Payment Gateways: Having a secure payment gateway is the most important component of a tutoring platform. A secure payment gateway checks and validates the payment in real-time and makes it easy for anyone to make the payment. The payment gateways should support multiple payment methods such as credit/debit cards, net banking, wallets.
• Powerful Admin Dashboards: A feature-rich admin dashboard of a tutoring platform enables the admin to have all the controls to manage the users on the platform. It also ensures optimum management of the processes from the backend. Admin should be able to view analytics regarding the revenue based on the number of courses, live sessions, enrollment, students, active courses, pending courses, unpaid revenue, etc. to draw useful insights.
• White Label & Customizable: Whether you are a startup, mid-sized organization, or a large enterprise, you want your tutoring platform to reflect your voice and your brand, and that is actually what a white label solution will do. Moreover, the white label solutions will also offer full customizability to cater to the different business requirements.
• Technical Support: Once you finalize a ready-made tutoring solution, make sure the solution provider offers technical support for any bugs and glitches post-launch. While user manuals and explainers videos provided with the online tutoring software can be referred to troubleshoot occasional errors, having quick access to an expert technician is always preferable.

Wrap Up

Choosing a tutoring solution is a tough job without proper research on all the options you have on the market. It is always a wise move to first research all the free and paid options, and then test out as many options based on your requirements. If you are looking for a ready-made customizable online learning solution, Yo!Coach is the one that meets the modern needs of both business and education institutes. Its easy-to-use, feature-rich, and configurable interface make it a preferred software for numerous edupreneurs around the world.