Tutors Home

Tutors Home is a website that helps to link private tutors to students in New Zealand . Tutors Home is not a tutoring agency nor tutoring company, therefore does she not have any personal relation with registered tutors on the website. All she provides is an online platform that makes finding tutor easy, quick and enjoyable. On the other hand, she allows private tutors to advertise online for free.

Tutors home works like this: New Zealand private tutors can register for free on the website. They are required to enter some key information such as what they teach, where they teach, hourly rate and other terms. When a student needs a tutor, they simply go to our website and perform a search with their own criteria. Students can send message to one or multiple tutors they found and ask for their availability and other details.

2 . Is Tutors Home free to use? TOP

It is entirely free to use Tutors Home. However, if you find it difficult to use the site or simply want us to do the job, a handling fee will apply. For more details about this extra service, please refer to 'Contact Us' page.

3. How can I benefit from joining Tutors Home? TOP

Once you joined Tutors Home, you will be able to advertise online for free. Since Tutors Home was launched in 2003, we have successfully helped hundreds of students to find a tutor online.

Tutors Home also offers you a 'Trust Rating System'. It allows you to collect feedbacks from students and then display the feedbacks under your public profile. If you received some decent feedbacks before, you will be able to gain credibility and increase chances to get more tutoring jobs.

4. How do I go about finding more students to teach? TOP

First thing you need to do, is to spend some time in writing your public profile properly. The more information you put down, the more students may get to know you. Our statistics shows a well written self-description significantly increases the chances of receiving more enquiries from new students.

Secondly, you can periodically check student's advertisement posted on our website. As long as you feel that you are capable in helping a student, you can send him/her a message to notify him about your availability.

Thirdly, which is very important, is to increase your credibility as much as possible. As mentioned above, one way of increasing credibility is to have a well written profile. Another very useful method is to invite the students you taught before to write some testimonials for you. Please refer to FAQ 16 to know more about this.

You will be awarded 'stars', which will show under your public profile, as indication of your credibility. The number of stars you have depends on the number of feedbacks you received.

5. Why do I have to register to see student's advertisements? TOP

We respect student's privacy as well as we respect yours. We need to protect our members from spam and fraud. That's why we must keep track of who uses our website.

Please note that we will never pass your information to other parties. Please refer to our 'Privacy Statement' for more details.

6. How does Tutors Home protect my privacy from spam and fraud? TOP

Tutors Home's goal is to provide the easiest and quickest way for people to find a good tutor online. However, we do not want to over expose our member's personal details. Nowadays we are experiencing unexpected spam and fraud from variety of sources. Many students asked 'why can't I access a tutor's contact details even after I have become a registered member?' Here's why: we leave our tutors to decide whether they want to give out their contact information.

Once a student has decided which tutor to contact, we allow him/her to send this tutor an internal message. A tutor will be able to see this message after they log on to our website. In the reply message, tutors can select whether to have their contact information attached to the message. This effectively helps tutors in filtering out unwanted enquiries. For example, when a tutor is fully booked, he/she may choose to reply them without giving out contact details. Or, of course, they can just ignore the enquiry.

Will Tutors Home use any of my contact information for other commercial use? Of course not! When Tutors Home was launched in July 2003, the founders invited all their mates to join this online community. Most of the tutors from early years know who the founders are, because the founders are university tutors too! We treat all members who registered on the site as friends; will you ever sell your friends' contacts to public? Probably not?-

Please refer to Privacy Terms section for more information.

7. What is required to become a tutor? TOP

All people who have the passion to teach, from professionals like lecturers, school teachers or university tutors, to individuals like college students, stage performers or housewife are welcome to join us. Everyone has their unique expertise. Tutoring is fun, and rewarding.

8. How can I let students trust me? TOP

It's all about how to increase your credibility. Generally speaking, the more feedbacks you have from previous students, the better credibility you will have. A well written self-description will help too. In your description, mention all qualification you have obtained, experience you gained, current career status etc. Imagine if you are going to trust someone, you want to know more about this person don't you? Here is the same situation.

There are other ways to increase confidence from students. For example, replying enquires promptly, with a short and brief self introduction, can create a professional image for you.

9. What is the Rating System about and how does it work? TOP

At the moment, rating system is solely based on the feedbacks that tutors received from their students. The more feedbacks a tutor has, the more 'stars' he will received. Number of stars given is based on the following rules:

1~5 feedbacks:
6~15 feedbacks:
16~30 feedbacks:
31~50 feedbacks:
51 feedbacks or more:

In the future, we will improve the rating system so that it doesn't just base on feedbacks. Other factors such as qualifications and experience etc will be included.

10. Why shouldn't I put my phone number and E-mail address in my public self-description ? TOP

That is because your privacy can be breached by anonymous internet users. For example, if you include your E-mail address in your personal description or in your advertisement, there will be robots on internet that claw your E-mail address automatically from the website. They will pass your information to unauthorized agencies that will send you SPAM mail or use your E-mail for other purposes.

For this reason, please only give your contact information to registered members by using the internal message system. Please note that Tutors Home reserves the right to remove or edit information posted by registered members.

11. How can I edit my profile? TOP

Once you log in with your E-mail and password, click on the 'Modify Profile' button on the right hand side of the page. Then you are able to modify your profile. Once finish, click on the 'Modify' button to save your change.

12. What can I do if I am temporally unavailable for tutoring? TOP

When you are temporally unavailable for tutorials, or simply don't want to receive new enquiries, you can set your status to 'Unavailable'. To do that, log in with your E-mail and password, click on the 'Modify Profile' button on the right hand side of the page. There's a check box at the bottom of the page for 'available'. This option is by default selected. You can deselect the option if you want to set your status to 'unavailable'. Remember to save your change by clicking the 'modify' button at the bottom.

13. What can I do if I don't teach anymore? TOP

You can set your status to 'unavailable' if you are not teaching anymore. By doing this, you can keep your profile and can change the status back to 'available' any time you want. To do this, please read FAQ 12.

14. Why Tutors Home's built-in message system can well protect my privacy? TOP

We do not show tutors' contact information directly to students due to concern on security and privacy issues. In the past while tutor's contact information is publicly listed, we received a few complaints that some parties registered as 'student' and collected tutor's contacts for commercial purpose. After discussion, we decided to implement a new internal message system.

Once a student has decided which tutor to contact, we allow him/her to send this tutor an internal message. In the reply message, tutors can select whether to have their contact information attached to the message. This effectively helps tutors in filtering out unwanted enquiries. For example, when a tutor is fully booked, he/she may choose to reply them without giving out contact details. Or, of course, they can just ignore the enquiry.

15. How can I change my password? TOP

To change password, log in with your E-mail and password, click on the 'Modify Profile' button on the right hand side of the page. In the password field, enter the new password. You will need to enter the same password in the 'Confirm Password' filed. Once finish, click on the 'Modify' button to save your change. You will be logged out automatically once password has been changed. You can then log in with the new password.

16. How can I add a student to 'My Students' list? TOP

When a tutor sends an internal message to a student, this student's name will be added to the tutor's 'My Students' list automatically regardless whether the student ends up hiring this tutor.

17. How to invite my students to write comments for me? TOP

After you log in as a tutor, click on 'My Students' button from the control panel on the right hand side, you will be able to see a list of students whom you have contacted before. Behind a student's name, there's a hyper link saying 'Invite Comments'. Click on it, and then you can edit and personalise an invitation message that has been drafted for you, and click 'Send' when finished. That student will then receive an E-mail to invite them for feedbacks.

For Student

1. What is Tutors Home and how does it work? TOP

2. Is Tutors Home free to use? TOP

3. How can I find a tutor at Tutors Home? TOP

Our powerful search engine offers quick and easy way to find a tutor who meets your requirements. On the search page, enter your criteria, such as tutoring subject, location and levels, and then click on 'search' button, all tutors who match your criteria will be display. Click on each tutor's profile page to get more details. You will be asked to register first if you are not yet registered or have not logged in.

In case that you have registered and logged in, when you click on a tutor's 'more details' page, you will find two buttons under this tutor's profile: 'Add to Favourite' and 'Inform this tutor'. Click the first button to add this tutor to your 'my favourite tutor' list so that you can contact him later, or click on 'Inform this tutor' to contact him immediately. The tutor will be in touch with you as soon as he/she sees the message.

Alternately, you can post an advertisement to seek tutoring services. Tutors will contact you once they see your message. To do this, log in as a student, click on 'Post Ads' button on the right hand side of the page. Write your advertisement as specific as possible so that only well matched tutors will reply your message.

4. What can I do if I can't find any tutor who matches my requirements on your website? TOP

In this case, you will need to post an advertisement. To do this, log in as a student, click on 'Post Ads' button on the right hand side of the page. Write your advertisement as specific as possible so that only well matched tutors will reply your message. New tutors will reply your message if they think they can help you.

5. What can I do if I manage to find a tutor after posting an advertisement? I don't want to receive any more replies from tutors. TOP

Once you have found a tutor, you can close your advertisement. To do this, log in as a student, click on 'View My Ads' to see all advertisements you have previously posted. Click on the 'close' button under each advertisement to close it permanently. Please note that you won't be able to activate the advertisement again once it is closed. You will have to post another advertisement if you need to find a new tutor.

Tutors will no longer contact you if your advertisement is set to 'closed'.

6. Why do I have to register in order to contact any tutor? TOP

Firstly for security reasons we have to keep track of who have contacted our tutors. Another reason is that we require some information from you to evaluate our website. For example, we sometimes need to study age group of people who use our website. We never sell or pass any of your personal information to other parties. Please refer to 'Privacy Terms' for more details.

7. Is Tutors Home responsible for the quality or behaviour of the tutors? TOP

Tutors Home is a plat form where communication occurs between tutors and students. Transactions and private tutoring service conducted between tutors and students are entirely at your own risk. Tutors Home takes no responsibility for any misconduct of its members. Tutors Home takes no responsibility for members that have registered under false pretences or any attempts by members to mislead other members.

Also, Tutors Home takes no responsibility for any tutoring effects or any other trouble caused by the tuition. Please read our Terms of Use for more information.

8. Who are the tutors on your website? TOP

Our tutors come from a wide range of sources. From our statistic, main occupations of our tutors are:

Academic university/institutes lecturers

College teachers

Current or former university tutors

University students with good academic records

Others ��C include people with specific knowledge and experience who consider tutoring as part-time or full time career. For example, guitar players, stage performers etc.

Please note that Tutors Home does not manually check qualifications of tutors. There is no minimum requirement to become a registered tutor on our site. As a result, anyone who believes he/she can teach is eligible to register as a tutor on our website. That's why it is important to read through the tutors' profile pages to choose the most suitable one.

9. There are many tutors on your website, but how can I find the best one? TOP

There are a few ways to identify quality of a tutor.

First of all you can read a tutor's self description to find out the qualification of this tutor. Normally if a tutor has some good qualifications or experience which will make him/her stand out, he/she will mention them in the description.

Secondly, check out a tutor's feedbacks from his/her previous students. We have designed a rating system which indicates rating level of each tutor. Here's how it works:

1~5 feedbacks:
6~15 feedbacks:
16~30 feedbacks:
31~50 feedbacks:
51 feedbacks or more:

Thirdly, don't be lazy to ask! Simply add prospective tutors to your 'favourite tutors' list. You can add as many tutors as you like to your list. Then write a message to ask them what qualification or experience they have. Also ask them if they believe they can help you in your circumstances and why they think so. Send this message to each of these tutors in your list to see how they response. You will be surprised how much more you will find out by asking questions.

Be very selective when choosing a tutor because a good tutor can be extremely helpful while the bad ones only waste your time and money.

10. The tutor I contacted did not reply my message, what can I do? TOP

This is common and is normally caused by the following reasons:

• The tutor has not read your message. Later we will add a function to show you whether the sent message has been read.

• For some reason the tutor chooses not to reply your message, for example, he thinks your living place is too far away. We encourage tutors to reply every message even if they don't want to teach. However we have no control of whether they will do it.

If this happens to you, you can either wait for another couple of days, or contact other tutors. It is harmless to contact multiple tutors at the same time to widen your options. Actually, it is a good idea to contact more than one tutor at the first place because if one is unavailable, the second one will do. If you receive replies from multiple tutors and confirmed that they are all available, choose one of them to become your final tutor. Kindly send a message to the others and let them know your status.

11. I want to find a tutor but I have difficulty in using your website. Can anyone do this job for me? TOP

If you have trouble using our website, or simply don't want to spend the time in contacting the tutors individually, you have the option of delegating this job to us. We will charge $69.50 NZD handling fee for this. Here's what we will do:

(1) Gather information from students/parents in order to know what makes an ideal tutor for them;

(2) Based on the requirements, perform detail search on our website and generate a list of prospective tutors;

(3) Choose a few tutors who well match student's/parents' requirements. Contact them individually by sending them an internal message to ask their availability on behalf of the student/parents. At this stage we do not give out the student's/parents' contact information.

(4) After we receive response from tutors and have confirmed their availability, we will pass their contact information to the student/parents.

(5) At this stage we have finished our task and students/parents will need to contact these tutors by themselves.

In the following circumstances we shall refund a portion of the payment:

(1) There's no single match to students requirements. In this case we shall post an advertisement for the student, and refund $40.

(2) We have not received any internal message response from the matched tutors. In this case we shall post an advertisement for the student, and refund $20.

For all other circumstances the payment is not refundable. For example, if we have selected a couple of tutors for the student, but the student do not like any of them and chooses not to hire them, his/her payment to Tutors Home will not be refunded.

12. What are the stars showing in each tutor's profile? TOP

We have designed a rating system. The number of stars gives you brief indication of how many feedbacks this tutor has received from his/her previous students.

1~5 feedbacks:
6~15 feedbacks:
16~30 feedbacks:
31~50 feedbacks:
51 feedbacks or more:

13. Can I trust the comments in each tutor's profile? TOP

We have done things to prevent the site from fraudulent feedbacks but we are still unable to guarantee that all feedbacks are genuine. To place a feedback, the student must:

• Be a registered member of Tutors Home;

• Have previous conversation of the tutor who is to be placed feedback on;

Overall, because we are in New Zealand , where people are well known for honesty, we should believe that chance of fraudulent feedbacks is small.

14. I have found a suitable tutor on your website quickly and easily, and I am quite happy. What can I do to thank you guys?

First of all we want to thank you too for using this website. It is already pride to have you as member of the website.

We will be even happier if you can write us some testimonials. To do it, simply log on as student as click the 'feedback' button on the right hand side.

Of course, we will not mind donations. To keep this site up and running and to encourage our team to continuously improve the site, we will be grateful if you are willing to compensate us. To make a donation, please contact support@tutorshome.co.nz

15. What can I do if I can't find any tutors who meet my requirements? TOP

The best thing you can do is to post an advertisement on our website. To do this, log on as student, click on 'Post Ads' button on the right hand side.

Others

1. Who created Tutors Home and what's your motivation of running this website? TOP

In 2003, 3 3 rd -year computer science students from the University of Auckland decided to build a website to help students who want to find tutors, and tutors who wish to have more students.

Traditionally, students find tutors by looking at notice board, and tutors market themselves by go around the campus and put up notice. This is time consuming, and is not effective either because notices get tore off or overlapped quickly. Why don't we create a place where information is easy to access, advertisements don't get removed, and a large number of tutors to choose from?

Tutors Home was launched in July 2003. We started off inviting friends to join the site ��C since we were Auckland University students, most of the early tutors were from the same university.

Now, all co-founders of Tutors Home are I.T. professionals under current employments. However we have not forgotten Tutors Home. We have been actively working on Tutors Home to improve functions, user interface and usability. The motivation of doing this project is mainly encouragements from both tutors and students. As of March 2006 we have helped hundreds of students successfully find tutors. We received many encouraging letters from users, which make us feel this project enjoyable.

Will we continue to work on Tutors Home? Yes of course we'll do! This is an enjoyable project and we pride ourselves to be able to contribute to New Zealand education.

2. I like your website and it helped me. Can I reward you guys in any form? TOP

First of all we want to thank you too for using this website. It is already our pride to have you as member of the website.

We will be even happier if you can write us some testimonials. To do it, simply log on as student as click the 'feedback' button on the right hand side.

3. I run a tutoring or education related business, can I contact the members on Tutors Home in respect to my service? TOP

We have come across this issue many times. Our answer is this: we welcome you to use Tutors Home in a 'usual way' that can benefit either tutors or students. For example, if you are running a tutoring company, you can have all your tutors registered on our website, and leave your company's contact details instead of individual tutor's contacts details.

However, please do not treat Tutors Home as a free way to advertise your products or services. This means never include your company's name or website URL in any form. If you want to advertise on our website, we offer banner space at reasonable cost. If you want to run an advertising campaign which tells our tutors about your product and service, contact us and get a quotation for it.

In general any commercial activity from a third party company on Tutors Home without given consent is in breach of our Terms of Use and therefore unlawful. We will consider this as offence to our policy and be very serious to it.

If you are unsure about whether your activity is in breach of our policy, contact us and discuss with us before you do it. We are open to many ideas and opportunities, but please, let us know before you do it.

4. Can I advertise my products and services on your website? TOP

You can do it at a cost. Please refer to FAQ 3 for details.

5. I run my own websites, can I exchange links with Tutors Home? TOP

Please send an invitation of link exchange to support@tutorshome.co.nz

6. How much does a banner space cost on your website? TOP

Please send an enquiry to support@tutorshome.co.nz and we will give you a quotation.