TutorOcean: Your Path to Becoming a Tutor

What is TutorOcean?

TutorOcean is a young online tutoring platform that offers to connect and manage student-tutor relationships, marketing the tutor’s services for a portion of the revenue.

How it works

Signing up with TutorOcean is easy. You fill out an application, which includes some personal information about you, your education and the subjects you want to teach.

Then create a profile, with a clear headshot, description of what makes you special and what you do, the hours you’re available and your hourly rates. The site also allows you to upload a video, which can make your profile stand out to students, who use the site’s search engine to find academic help.

The site notifies you when you have a booking and allows you to tutor either online with their electronic tools or in person. TutorOcean will also collect payment from your students and shoots payment to you, minus a site commission, within 48 hours of completing a session.

TutorOcean review:

TutorOcean offers an attractive package for tutors — teaching tools, marketing and collection help for a fee that ranges from 5% to 20%, depending on how many services you use.

The site offers an online meeting space, with whiteboard and support. And it accepts tutors in nearly all subjects, including academic basics like reading and math, as well as music and sports.

TutorOcean makes few demands on tutors, who self-select their subject areas, rates, and availability. It expects you to post your education and experience. But you’re not barred from registering as a tutor on the platform if your experience and credentials are less than stellar.

The site suggest that you connect any YouTube videos you have that show your teaching style. You could also offer a sample lesson, to help students connect with you visually.

Cost

Another nice feature is that TutorOcean has a staggered fee structure that charges nothing for tutors who want to use the platform’s software to teach, but don’t need help finding students or billing for their services.

Those who want to bring their own students, but want TutorOcean to handle the money, pay a 5% fee. However, if TutorOcean finds the students and provides the billing support, tutors pay a 20% commission to the platform.

These fees compare favorably with other online tutoring platforms, such as Wyzant, Varsity Tutors, and TutorMe.

Pay

Tutors are generally paid through Stripe 48 hours after a session is complete. However, those who prefer to use PayPal are paid once monthly.

One Concern

If a student complains about a tutoring session, the tutor is not paid. Naturally, that student would not be able to book that same tutor again and get a second free session. But it appears this rule could be abused. We saw no sign of that in tutor reviews of the platform, however.

Positive tutor reviews

The main complaint we see about TutorOcean is that it is new and sometimes doesn’t draw enough students to keep tutors busy. But the site’s structure is tutor-friendly and some tutors find great success here. Overall, tutors give this site 4 stars out of 5 on Glassdoor, which puts it in the top 10% of more than a dozen sites reviewed on SideHusl.com.

Recommendations

We like this site and believe it serves tutors well. But online tutoring platforms are not exclusive. You can sign up with several sites, if you want to boost your chance of finding students. Sign up for TutorOcean here.

Other sites we like: Wyzant and LessonFace.

What their users say (from Glassdoor)

Self-set hours, get a decent amount of requests. High quality students. Possibly high pay. I receive requests with a rate over $100 per hour. And you have the ability to accept or reject requests at one’s own discretion. But there’s not enough work to be full time. Maybe part time, but it is spotty sometimes. And there’s only seasonal demand for many subjects.

This is a good remote part-time job.

Your pay is capped, if you work with an affiliated university.

Great assistance. You put the price that you want. But students are not always responsive.