To be clear, TeachStreet is not building an online tutoring service. But there are a plethora of companies pursuing such a goal, including TutorVista, Tutor.com, Infilearn and a friend’s startup ziizoo, to name a few; and I’m excited about what they’re building. I’m sure I’ll summarize this a little incorrectly/broadly, but what they’re building is a system whereby students in one location (at home, in front of their computer) can get tutoring assistance from experts in another location. Often, these tutors are overseas (in India, China, the Philippines) and are experts (college graduates, many with Masters Degrees) in their fields. They’re able to provide visual and audio support thanks to the improving technologies (VOIP, online whiteboard solutions, etc.) And because of economic differences, they can earn an above-average local wage while providing services to students at below-average cost levels (in the US, for instance).

This is amazing! Imagine yourself back in high school and you’re struggling with a few geometry problems. Your parents would love to help, but you know how that goes. You need a tutor. You just pop off of Facebook, open up your tutoring site, locate an online tutor and voila, you can explain your problem (via voice) and even draw up the equation that’s giving you problems (on the online whiteboard). They then can explain different ways of solving the problem and/or show you a solution. No, this isn’t about getting people to do your homework (although I’m sure some students will take all the help they can get!); rather, it’s about getting you over the speed-bumps toward understanding.

Most of these services charge <$30/hour (some have monthly plans, and TutorVista even offers a $50 for unlimited 30-day trial… Tutor.com offers a first 50 minutes for $5 trial), which is far below the effective rate you’d pay at a local learning center, not to mention the immediacy of assistance, lack of gas, and other costs.

Finally, I’m sure there will be kinks in these systems, but TutorVista’s President, John Stuppy, just blogged about that as well — that the technology to deliver online tutoring is only going to get better every day, week, month and year — in a few years, I expect that this type of on-demand assistance will be as common as downloading songs to your iPod (via wi-fi/cell services!). He wrote about the typical Innovator’s Dilemna… that as new innovations rise up, many of them are “poor replacements”, but over time, they nibble away at the edges and provide enough benefit at a low enouch cost to start to address customer’s unmet needs (by entrenched competitors, like physical learnning centers, in this case). Expect that nibbling to continue. (Note — this isn’t exactly nibbling either… Tutor.com reports that they’ve delivered more than 112,000 one-on-one tutoring sessions in the last 30 days!)

In the meantime, we’ll be working to address a different customer need — that is, to help people find individual experts (tutors, trainers, coaches, classes) who they can meet with face-to-face to learn new things — our opinion is that people have different learning needs (sort of like having the choice to buy a New or Used book on Amazon — there are times when BOTH are the ideal solution!).