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I’ve found these tips invaluable in finding an online college tutor, but if you want the best tutors on the market I would really recommend you click here to go to the vtamethod. It is in my opinion the best online college tutoring company on the market today.

Anyway, here are some tips:

Vet the tutoring company: Online tutoring for college students is becoming increasingly popular as many students realize that they need 24/7 help but can’t afford the 100 dollars plus an hour for high end tutors to teach them in person. With many more tutoring companies offering their services up on the net, it becomes increasingly important to ‘vet’ the companies you want to work with.

What subject are you trying to learn?: Online college math tutoring is by far the most popular subject taught online, specifically, online college algebra tutors are in high demand and usually are quite expensive to hire. College math tutors can cost anywhere form 50 (for an undergrad) to 250 dollars an hour (for a phd or professor). That’s why I personally like to go to companies that offer a flat rate for all subjects and can tutor me on multiple subjects. As an example I might need an online college algebra tutor and a english tutor. Higher end companies allow you to purchase monthly subscriptions to get access to their entire staff which in my opinion is much better than just hiring a single tutor.

Make sure they are reputable: Many online tutoring companies say that they have high quality tutors but a lot of the time they are outsourced guys from India that make a dollar an hour while you pay the company 50 an hour. I once saw a college math tutoring company that was paying their tutors 5% of what the student way paying the company. Many reputable companies split the fee between their tutor and their company. In my opinion you get what you pay for so make sure the money you’re paying your tutoring company is actually going to the tutor!

Find out where the tutors come from: Online tutoring for college students has exploded because it’s becoming so easy to hire cheap labour from overseas to work. The problem with hiring these tutors is that they don’t know the western college system, they are usually overworked and they are really badly underpaid. Any reputable company will simply hire ‘western’ tutors who have actually gone to universities or colleges in North America or Europe. I’ve tested hiring outsourced tutors from cheaper countries and they are more trouble than they are worth. Take the time to hire somebody good and in my opinion they should have a masters or phd.

If you want to check out a company I think does this perfectly, visit the vtamethod.com

Before anything else, let us know first the basics of effective learning:

• Memory as Problem Solving Tool,  Good problem solving requires an “active memory” that gives you quick, reliable access to essential thinking tools.  A good memory isn’t sufficient to make you an expert problem solver (you also need creativity and logic) but it is necessary. To improve your memory, take advantage of original awareness with intention to remember, organization, and review.

• Concentration, “exclusive attention to one object” and to concentrate is “to bring all efforts, faculties, etc., to bear on one thing or activity.”  Good concentration is an extremely valuable thinking tool.

• Active Reading and Listening,
  

1. Flexibility, Decide what your purpose is and adjust your reading accordingly.
2. Speed, One simple speed technique is effort- just try to read faster, read groups of words not one word at a time.
3. Comprehension, Read carefully, think about sentence structure and word meaning [use the "technical" definition of words like velocity, acceleration, force, work, energy and heat, not "everyday meanings" ] , study the diagrams, work out the examples & derivations, and answer the questions that are asked — they’ll stimulate your thinking and this will help you learn.
4. Critical Thinking, Don’t believe everything you read, but do be ready and eager to learn from your reading.  When a book discusses ideas about politics, philosophy or religion, be critical.  Keep an open mind in trying to understand ideas, think carefully about facts and their interpretation, consider the author’s bias, then think for yourself and decide what you do and don’t want to “accept.”
5. Creative Thinking, Use a book for inspiration, to help you generate your own creative ideas.  Look for ways to combine new and old knowledge.  Ask “How does this fit into the structure of what I already know?”  { But remember which ideas are yours, and which are the author’s.  Don’t “put ideas on her page” that she didn’t intend to be there.  And don’t plagiarize by claiming that you discovered ideas when you actually read them in her book. }
6. Stop and Go-Reading, A good way to understand and remember ideas is to read for awhile, stop and think, read more, stop and think, read, stop, and so on.  What should you do when you stop?  Think, recite, write.
7. Re-reading, Use “successive approximations” to get an increasingly accurate and complete understanding.  It is often useful to do three readings: a quick survey, careful reading, and re-reading.  Depending on your time, purpose and motivation, re-reading can be done carefully, or a quick review of the important points (use your notes and book-marking as a guide), or just read what you need for doing problems.

• Exam Preparation and Performance, You probably have two learning goals for every college course:  1) to learn things that will be useful in your future courses, in a career and in life, and  2) to do well on exams so you’ll get a good grade and “GPA credit” for what you know.

1. Gather Information
2. Early Exam Preparation
3. Late Exam Preparation
4. Exam Performance
5. After the Exam

• Using your time Effectively, Dost thou love life?  Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.  { Benjamin Franklin, 1746 }
  Three ways to use your time more effectively are wise planning, good timing, and increased efficiency.

1. Planning, The foundation of planning is knowing yourself and what you want to do with your abilities and opportunities.  { This doesn’t necessarily mean having a specific career goal.  As a student, your immediate goal may be to earn grades (and skills) that give you good options to choose from later. }  Wise planning is choosing daily activities that help you make progress toward your long-term goals.
2. Timing, Good timing lets you take advantage of opportunities while they’re still available.
   Timing is an important part of planning;  you are deciding what to do and also when to do it.
3. Effeciency, To get more done, you can  1) waste less time, and  2) work more efficiently.
   There may be more time than you realize.  Do the following hours-per-week seem reasonable?  Sleep (50), classes (17), study (21) and meals (10), for a total of 98 hours.  There are 168 hours in a week: where did the other 70 hours go?  /  Some time is used for getting dressed, commuting, work (if you have a job) and play, but probably not 70 hours.  Do you think you could find more studying time by using small blocks of time (like “transition times” between major activities) that are usually wasted, and by taking large blocks of non-study time and cutting them down to medium size blocks?
   To minimize your transition time, be decisive and avoid procrastination.

More learnings at http://vtamethod.com/