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Online tutoring is likely to soon receive a boost in consumer confidence--or at least familiarity--given a number of recently announced strategic partnerships. HiFusion (Reston, VA), which offers free Internet access and an educational portal, has partnered with Totornet.com (Mclean, VA). Highwired (Watertown, MA), a high school community tool and portal, has partnered with Tutor.com (New York, NY); TopTutors.com (Santa Monica, CA) has struck a deal with Lightspan (San Diego, CA); and Smarthinking.com (Washington, DC) will soon announce a deal with a major college portal. The activity is likely to make the average Internet user far more aware of the possibility of online tutoring.

Dean Kephart of HiFusion, says their agreement was driven largely by customer demand. Tutornet offers $29.95 monthly access to all-you-can-learn, live tutoring via a web-based whiteboard and chat area. They sell to elementary through college-age students. In another portal deal, Tutornet and GoToWorld.com, a general Internet portal that pays surfers to use the site, are currently developing a co-branded customized service that will link directly to the GoToWorld main site.

Smarthinking.com (profiled in ISEM, Jan., 2000) is also finding distribution channels through a strategic alliance with PBS, in deals with Houghton Mifflin and Thompson Learning, and in not-yet-announced agreements with a technology platform company and a content company. Christopher Gergen, ceo and co-founder, says his company will pursue partnerships that allow the company to customize their tutoring support to a specific book or other content. That niche is matched with a marketing emphasis on higher education institutional sales.

The agreement between Lightspan and TopTutor.com (TopTutor.com was also profiled in the Jan 2000 ISEM) gives the online tutoring company placement of their branded, proprietary content on the Lightspan site. Lightspan users have access to Toptutor.com's national network of tutors and the company's student academic assessment, Edutest@class. Toptutor.com will receive significant exposure to Lightspan's community of students and teachers via 16 million impressions on Lightspan.com, online sponsorship opportunities on Lightspan.com, and an offline marketing initiative with Lightspan's professional development programs.

Tutor.com creates a marketplace and learning platform

Tutor.com, not previously profiled in ISEM, serves as a marketplace connecting students with tutors on any subject. Tutoring could range from Algebra for an 8th grader to negotiation skills for the executive. George Cigale, ceo, says the site is focused on any form of one-to-one learning. It may soon offer one-to-few experiences, but courses are an unlikely development.

Tutor.com provides the brokerage service for users to find tutors, provides a technology platform for online tutoring (though about half of the tutors in their database teach face to face), preauthorizes credit cards and manages payments, and provides tools for users to post assessments of tutors. Cigale says the company does not tell tutors what to teach or how to teach. The company takes $1 per transaction plus 10% of the hourly fee, a rate that tutors set for themselves.

Rather than driving people to their site, Tutor.com is partnering with sites that already have an appropriate audience. Many of these partners make Tutor.com look like their own site. Highwired, for example, will have a Highwired-branded tutoring area. They will initially give access to all Tutor.com tutors, but they hope to build a private community of tutors from their own users. Other partners with this model include Thinkwave (Sausalito, CA) and some unannounced school districts and colleges in New York City and Massachusetts. Schools typically list their own teachers first, but also provide access to the larger database of Tutor.com tutors.

In January, the site launched their FastMatch service to link users with tutors available online at that moment. Cigale says it will be about a month before users can search all online tutors to set up a scheduled time. About half of the site's users, says Cigale, are seeking an answer to an immediate problem with a 30- to 45-minute session, and about half want to substitute traditional tutoring services with the online option. Improving the calendaring and scheduling tools, he expects, will drive usage among customers wanting repeat tutoring sessions. Tutor.com will also be adding voice over IP in the coming month.

The site also allows tutors to pay for a background check on themselves; that assurance of no criminal background is used as search criteria and tutor information in the system. Tutor.com does not take any revenue from that transaction.

The tutoring site was founded in partnership with the Princeton Review (New York, NY), which contributed seed funding, access to their more than 10,000 tutors and more than $2 million in in-kind marketing. It also contributed the attractive domain name, which it had purchased before the formation of Tutor.com. The Princeton Review has a minority stake in and board seat with Tutor.com.

Tutor.com, a 45-employee company, recently closed an $11 million second round of financing led by Wit Sound View Ventures (New York, NY). The Princeton Review and Northstar Capital Partners, first round investors, also participated. Prior to that financing, Tutor.com was working with $1.8 million.