Welcome to the NEW Personalized Sylvan Tutoring Service….

Hello all,

The link for my Elevator Pitch is below and posted on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXBKx-t77n4

As for my venture pitch, I’ve embedded it as a word file within this post.

Please let me know if there is any difficulty accessing the youtube video and I’ll try and assist.

Thanks so much. Enjoy.

-Regen Schmidt

 

Venture Pitch: Making Tutoring More Personable

 

Current state of Sylvan Tutoring Company

 

From a personal interview with a previous employee of the Sylvan Tutoring service, A. Beyer, reported the following. Currently, students using the Sylvan tutoring service are randomly matched up by instructors in groups of 1-3, for a 1 hour period. Within these small groups students vary in ability and age. In addition, each student could be requesting help in various subject matter such as English, Math, Social Studies, so it is therefore possible for all three students within a group to be asking for help in different areas. It is therefore up to the instructor to be knowledgeable in a breadth of academic areas.

 

Proposed Changes

 

The venture I am proposing changes the pre-existing format of the Sylvan tutoring Company into a more personalized tutoring experience by simply offering students the option of choosing their own tutor for each tutoring session. If a particular student has no preference of tutor they will simply be matched up with any available tutor upon arrival. Obviously, if a student is new to the Sylvan tutoring experience then they will not know which tutors seem to help best with their individual learning needs and specific learning style. Once experienced, and once each student realizes which tutor seems to ‘fit’ best, then they can begin to take advantage of a new tutoring format where they can choose their own tutor.   

 

Alongside allowing students to choose their tutor, there will also be changes taking place with regards to the size of the tutoring classes. Tutoring groups will also be reduced from three students to become individual tutoring sessions where the ratio of tutor to student will be one-to-one.  

 

The same way a student visits their school counselor and requests to be placed in their favorite teachers’ class, students utilizing the new Sylvan tutoring format will also be able to choose their tutor from a wide range of professional instructors.

 

Prior to these changes, Sylvan would have been responsible in scheduling when students would be having their tutoring sessions. Though now with students choosing their tutor, the organizational duties will start to shift to become the responsibility of each tutor to inquire as to what tutoring times suit their students. In order to improve organization and accommodate this change in format, Sylvan will only need to provide and post some sort of monthly calendars to instructors and patrons in an effort to better match up specific instructor and student availability for future tutoring sessions.   

 

Marketing

 

            Current users of the Sylvan tutoring company would immediately hear of the changes that will be implemented to make tutoring individualized. Since most students currently using the tutoring service are of K-12 in age, this age group is quite sociable, and will therefore easily pass on most of the new information through word-of-mouth communication with friends. Since current employees of Sylvan already send out emails to the teachers of students that they tutor, then Sylvan employees could also inform each of the school teachers they email of the changes taking place to their tutoring format.

 

Foreseeable Benefits for Students and Addressing Counter Arguments to the Proposed Venture

 

Allowing students their choice of tutors creates a more personal tutoring experience, and therefore creates a more comfortable learning environment for both tutors and students. More comfort increases potential for enjoyment but more importantly increases the chances that students will then begin to ask more specific questions, a critical step in ensuring meaningful learning will take place.

 

Lowering the ratio of student-tutor ration to be one-to-one will also make the tutoring sessions more focused on what each student needs instead of one tutoring focusing on meeting the educational needs of three students. One may suggest a counter-argument supporting the old system by stating that tutoring within a group may be more educationally beneficial since the students could help each other during the session. This argument would be considered a reasonable if the students within each tutoring group were all learning the same concepts, within the same subject matter. Though, during any given tutoring session within the old format, students were matched with tutors based on availability and not necessarily what other students in the group were receiving educational support for. Therefore within a typical tutoring group there would be multiple subjects being studied so students typically would not be able to assist others with learning.

 

In response to the reasoning within the previous paragraph one could then suggest that a better solution would be to group students together based on subject matter and not tutor availability. This additional counter-argument and idea would potentially succeed if all students attending Sylvan for tutoring would be requesting assistance with the same material within in a course, and this seems quite unlikely.    

 

Foreseeable Monetary and Reputational Benefits for Sylvan

 

Students who enjoy themselves while being taught by tutors that they have repeatedly chosen for tutoring sessions will more likely continue to choose Sylvan for their educational needs because of the relationships and ties that have been created within the establishment.

 

If students continue to be tutored by random teachers and not have any consistency in teaching methods, then fewer social ties are established and students therefore do not feel as connected to the experience. Feeling anonymous or isolated could potentially result in students leaving the Sylvan program in order to seek other help that can fulfill their needs of consistency and familiarity.    

 

Reducing the tutoring group from three students to individual tutoring will not generate as much revenue for Sylvan but once students begin to feel more in control of their own learning and feel that the tutoring is more suited to their own needs then they will utilize Sylvan for a longer period of time, and more frequently, and the revenue generated over time will be greater than the initial loss encountered. A certain percentage of the money being asked for within this venture pitch will be provided to subsidize the initial loss in revenue resulting from the change in group tutoring to individual, personalized tutoring.  

 

Sylvan tutoring is costly for users and parents who financially support their children’s tutoring. Therefore parents may desire for a personal plan to be established and implemented to benefit the academic success of their unique child. Having small groups established for tutoring sends a message to parents that their son or daughter has to compete for the attention of the sole tutor present. Individualizing the tutoring experience will work to send a better message to parents about Sylvan’s newly focused concern for their students as individual learners. This new individualized plan will dissolve any anonymity for students and reinforce parents decisions for continually bringing their children to Sylvan when they need extra help in school.    

 

Challenges & Limitations

 

Challenges to this new student and tutor relation will include decreased availability for popular tutors and increased availability for less popular tutors. The unique type of availability for each tutor will also change. The work schedule for popular tutors will become more consistent because of the individual students who continue to request them. The less popular tutors would still be available to help students who do not have a preference for which tutor they receive assistance from, so their schedule will continue to resemble a drop-in format.

 

Tutors that are popular with a few students will typically be popular with other additional students in general too, and this scenario will therefore create some competition amongst all of Sylvan’s tutors. From the perspective of Sylvan company ownership, competition in this sense amongst their employees can only heighten efficient workplace efficiency and hopefully professionalism among their staff. In the previous system, the level of one tutors employment was directly related to how popular Sylvan was for students. In this new format, which honors student choice of tutors, each tutor’s level of employment is now dependent on their own popularity amongst Sylvan’s customers. These foreseeable changes to the types of employment of Sylvan’s staff will quite possibly result in changes to the composition of its staff. Some staff will excel in this type of workplace environment, while others will not want to work under these work conditions which could be compared to ‘piecework’, where employees earn wages only when they are working.       

 

Looking to the Future

 

If Sylvan wanted to further increase its client base in the future, then it could think about recruiting local teachers to become tutors within the evening. From Sylvan’s perspective this idea would be quite popular with students who have favorite teachers or who want to be tutored by a past or present teacher that they share an educational connection with. Adding more tutors who teach during the evening will establish a wider tutor selection list for students and create a sort of menu of tutors available for students to choose from. Again, more choice in the number of tutors available would appeal more to students and give them more reason to continue using Sylvan’s services.

 

From a teacher perspective, private tutoring for an educational company like Sylvan offers extra income and a more legitimate tutoring experience than tutoring students out of one’s garage for cash. According to many district Code of Ethics, it is somewhat of a conflict of interest to be tutoring one’s own students in exchange for money. This idea of recruiting more actual teachers to tutor within Sylvan establishments would also be a differentiating component for the company that would make it unique amongst other tutoring facilities.   

 

Self Evaluation: Strengths

 

The idea of making the tutoring format of Sylvan more personalized seems to mirror the current direction of most public school districts future outlook for K-12 education. As school districts try and make student learning more unique for each individual, allowing students to choose their own tutor for tutoring sessions makes Sylvan appear quite conscious of current learning trends and illustrates flexibility on their part to do what is best for the education of their customers.  

 

            Switching the format of tutoring to allow students to choose their own tutor will involve little change for the Sylvan company and will take little funding for this change to be quickly realized. Once in place, parents of children using the new Sylvan service will feel better about financially supporting their children if the service being offered is more specifically tailored to the learning needs of their own child.    

 

Self Evaluation: Weaknesses

 

The biggest weakness with this proposal is the lack of revenue that Sylvan will initially experience once switching to this new personalized form of tutoring. Instead of groups of three students each paying for the tutoring services of one tutor, Sylvan will only be earning the payment from one student for the services of one tutor. Though, this loss of initial revenue is not to suggest further losses in revenue under the new proposed format of tutoring so the Sylvan company must be patient. Once students and parents begin to realize the full educational benefits of a more personalized tutoring approach, then Sylvan will then begin to recoup its losses.

 

One other weakness in the proposal concerns the potential loss of some staff from Sylvan Company due to the change in tutoring format. The new format will definitely benefit some tutors who are currently well-liked by students, and are also skilled at explaining concepts in a way students understand best. Though, those tutors who are not as popular or have difficulty in explaining concepts to students in several ways, may end up choosing to quit working for Sylvan due to lack of steady employment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sources

 

Beyer, A., personal communication, July 23rd, 2012.

 

Sylvan Learning. (2012). Retrieved from http://tutoring.sylvanlearning.com

 

Sylvan Learning Inc. (Producer). (2011, October 11) Does your Child Need a

 

Tutor? Retrieved July 23, 2012 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVuQ1NcN0aM

 

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