Getting the most from online tutoring sessions

Online tutoring has moved from an emergency solution to a genuinely preferred format for a large portion of the students and adult learners we work with. The flexibility is real, the quality — when the session is set up well — is comparable to in-person, and for some types of learning it is actually superior.

But online sessions do fail more easily than in-person sessions when students treat them casually. The physical separation creates a lower psychological threshold for disengagement. Here is what the students who make the most progress in online sessions consistently do differently.

1. Treat the online session as a real appointment — not a phone call

The most common source of problems in online tutoring is not technical. It is the absence of the psychological preparation that attending a physical location produces. When you travel to a tutoring studio, the commute functions as a transition: you arrive in a different mental state from the one you left home in.

Recreate this deliberately. Five minutes before a session begins: close all other browser tabs. Put your phone out of reach. Have your materials open. Sit at a desk, not on a bed or sofa. The aim is to arrive at the session already focused, not to focus during it.

2. Use paper alongside the screen

Students who work exclusively on screen during online sessions tend to retain less than those who also write by hand. This appears to be partly because handwriting is slower and forces greater processing of information, and partly because students who are working with pen and paper are demonstrably less likely to switch attention to other browser content.

Keep paper and pen at your desk for every session. Write down key points, work through problems by hand, make notes of things you want to come back to. The written record also serves a second function: it gives you something to review between sessions that feels more substantial than a screen recording.

3. Tell your educator what you have tried before asking for help

In online sessions, the educator cannot see your work until you share it. This creates a common pattern where students say "I don't understand this" and wait — which prompts the educator to guess what specifically is unclear. The session then loses time to diagnostic work that could have happened before the meeting.

Instead: before the session, attempt the problems you are planning to discuss. When you ask for help, say specifically what you tried and where you got stuck. "I got to the point where I needed to factorise the denominator and I couldn't see how to do it" is more useful than "I couldn't do question 4."

4. Camera on

This will not be a popular recommendation, but it is a consistent one: students who keep their camera on during online sessions learn more. The social presence effect — the feeling of being observed — reduces distraction and increases the degree to which students behave as they would in a physical room with another person.

This is not about surveillance. It is about recreating, as much as possible, the psychological conditions of a real meeting. Those conditions are better for learning than the conditions of watching a recording or listening to a call.

5. End each session with one spoken summary

The final two minutes of an online session are often lost to logistics: agreeing the next session time, saying goodbye. Instead, use the last two minutes for the student to summarise verbally what they covered and what they will do before the next session. This functions as a retrieval check and creates a stronger memory trace than simply ending the session.

It also shifts the close of the session to something active rather than passive, which matters for how well the content is consolidated in the hours that follow.

6. Set up your environment once, properly

Fixing your setup before a series of sessions begins is far more effective than dealing with problems as they arise. Specifically: test your microphone and camera at least once before your first session. Agree with household members that you are not to be interrupted during sessions. If you use a laptop, position it so you can have paper below it without looking down too steeply. Check that your lighting means the educator can see your face clearly.

Technical problems during sessions are a reliable source of disruption and frustration. Most of them are preventable. Preventing them takes twenty minutes once; fixing them mid-session takes longer and costs considerably more cognitive resource.

The advantage online sessions can actually offer

One genuine advantage of online sessions over in-person that is worth naming: students are often more willing to admit confusion to a screen than to a person sitting two feet away. The slight physical distance appears to reduce the social cost of saying "I don't understand." For students who find it difficult to ask for help in person, this is a real benefit that the online format provides.

If you notice yourself understanding things more clearly when you can ask questions freely, online sessions may actually be the better format for you long-term. The goal is effective learning, not a particular delivery method.