Tutorspree, coaching and scalability

16 September 2013

Hindsight is 20/20, and I myself struggled in multiple attempts to scale up coaching programs in academics. And so this all to say that the following post is in no way a criticism of Tutorspree, which has recently shut down.

To make a long story short, the founders themselves acknowledge that the main problem they faced was scalability, and that's not surprising. Good quality coaching is such a personal endeavor, requiring a lot of energy from the coach to deeply understand not only the area of the person being coached, but also his/her skills and weaknesses. So, it's almost like doing it yourself, except that you do not have (and don't want to have) a great degree of control over what exactly the person being coached will do.

So, does all this means that it is impossible to scale coaching up. I don't think so, but in order to do it well it likely requires some basic principles if you are attempting to create a coaching environment:

Niches: coaching is a specialized activity, and so you've got to segment your groups. One fits all is hard. For example, it would be difficult to create a single environment to coach programmers and healthcare professionals side by side. They require different content, with content being presented in different formats.
Provide good support content so that coaches' time can be spent on problem and skill needs identification: Coaches are good because they can pinpoint what the likely problem is in a given situation, and then point the person being coached to the skill he will likely need to address that problem. A good environment for coaching therefore needs to provide good content presented in an adequate framework.
Good content: Having access to good content will save coaches' time and therefore attract them. Think about it, if I am coaching somebody and then have to explain every single detail on my own, my life would be a living hell. If instead I can focus on identifying problems and then simply pointing the people I coach to good material, my job is significantly simplified. Goes without saying that the coach herself has to be trained to locate this content. Ultimate result here is what I mentioned in a previous post as a ladder: If the person can learn the basics from good, automatic content in the form of videos, slides, exercises, etc, then the coaching time will be optimized.
Good content placed in a variety of learning frameworks: good content resources used by coaches have to be constantly evolving not only in terms of format. For example, a step-by-step learning material might be a great resource at one point, but later on a coach might want to point the person being coached to a learning material that instead talks about the most common errors in a certain field. "Step by step" material and learning by showing common "errors and fixes" are different frameworks to present the same problem, both needed in different situations.
Communication platforms: In our day and age, it's unlikely that your dream come true coach will be your next door neightboor. Communication platforms used to be very difficult to find a few years ago, nowadays we have plenty of good options. Google Hangouts are my favorite, provided the coach and the person being coached both have access to a decent Internet connection and are reasonably computer literate.
Coaching mentality: To be a coach you have to think like a coach or, even better, you have to like to be a coach. In other words, you have to think about the other person first. Finding the right person used to be a nightmare, since you had to define psychometric characteristics that were predictive of good coaching and then hope that they would work. They usually wouldn't. But now there are social networks, which allow people to communicate about who the good and bad coaches might be. So, way less of a problem.

by Ricardo Pietrobon

About Me

My name is Ricardo Pietrobon and I am interested in big data and situated cognition applied to immersive distance education.