Online Tutoring: Trialling SuperProf Premium for 30 days

You may have found that many online tutoring platforms offer a premium or boosted option to tutors, claiming that this will increase the number of students. I decided to trial the SuperProf Premium membership to see if it is all that it claims to be. Here’s how I found it!

There are a ridiculous number of tutoring platforms, agencies and databases for new private tutors available on the internet. All of them, seemingly without fail, claim to have tutors’ interest at heart and promise that you will be teaching multiple students within a week. Many have claims such as “on average our tutors earn £120 per week in their first month” (Tutor Bloc) which turn out to just be garbage… (6 weeks of my profile on their app and my profile was never viewed!)

What is SuperProf?

SuperProf is an absolutely huge online tutoring platform, with almost 11.5 million registered tutors in their database. They are actively looking for tutors to teach the 1001 different subjects already advertised. While the site seems to be largely used for academic subjects, and I myself have only explored this section of the website, there are opportunities to teach and learn everything from animal training to the kazoo.

What is SuperProf Premium like?

I tried the SuperProf premium tutoring account service for 30 days to see how it would affect the quantity and quality of work I found during that time compared to the previous 30 days of my (unchanged) profile being live on their platform on the free service.

30 Days of SuperProf Free

On my account I offer GCSE, and A Level tutoring of Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Maths (including Statistics and Further Maths). I also offer University Tuition for preclinical medicine, biochemistry and biomedicine. The third service I offer is tuition in the medical entry exams (UCAT, BMAT and GAMSAT). These are all priced competitively for a tutor with my experience of 3+ years of private tutoring.

In the first 30 days of free SuperProf membership I was approached for lessons once, by a student seeking GCSE Chemistry tuition. After days of back and forth the student stopped replying.

Total month’s Revenue from SuperProf= £0.00

30 Days of SuperProf Premium

In my first 30 days of a premium account I was approached six different times. Of these, four have gone on to yield repeat lessons and projects. I have taken on: Group GCSE and A Level Classes 6 times per week; GAMSAT tutorials once per week; tutoring an MSc student and assisting a doctor construct a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Two of the requests I received didn’t lead to paid work. One was a request for immediate same day tutoring that I wasn’t able to do. The other was a group of three medical students looking for someone to sit an online exam for them! Highly unethical and unprofessional! So, on the whole, 2/3rds of the messages I received led to paid work.

Total month’s Revenue from SuperProf= £900.00 (- cost of premium £27.00 pm or £99.00 pa)

So what’s it worth it? Yes, I think it is!

Of course, this was only a single 30 day trial of an individual account. But, for me at least, SuperProf Premium has proven to be entirely worth it! If you are interested, I will update this blog post again after the next 30 days.

So, as a student looking to pick up some private tutoring, how does SuperProf compare to the other options?

The top search result that google will give almost every time is a site called MyTutor. Now, MyTutor is not an awful tutoring site. They have a huge number of tutors but also many many students from KS3 to University. However, there are two issues I have found with MyTutor which also apply to many of the other tutoring platforms.

Firstly, they take a large chunk of commission, often up to 25%. When the suggested starting rate is £18 per hour, this can lead to relatively small earnings for you. Remember that tutoring is not just the time face-to-face with the student, it is also lesson planning, making resources, learning different curricula and making/marking homework.

Secondly, MyTutor requires for all lessons, homework, reviews and interactions to be conducted through their website. While I understand this from a safeguarding angle, there are other websites where this is not the case and all tutors are DBS (criminal background) checked before tutoring. It also means that there is no incentive for tutors to bring existing clients onto the platform, as the website will end up taking a large cut. Their online classroom does give you all the tools you might need for a lesson, but it’s nothing more than is available on a free zoom account. Plus, for me at least, it doesn’t work at all most of the time.

SuperProf has (so far) been my favourite, most profitable and easiest to use online tutoring platform.

Are you a student starting online tutoring and looking for a way to start? Let me know what platform you end up using!

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If you end up signing up for SuperProf Premium through one of the links on this page you’ll be signing up through one of my ‘Sponsorship’ links. This will grant me a month of free premium, which I would greatly appreciate!