Tutoring is the oldest pedagogy. Long before the famous Greed philosophers tutored their students in the Agora, master hunters and gatherers took a few young adults with them, demonstrating to them, helping them conceptualize the task, and criticizing how they performed in the challenging tasks of their society. And telling tales about this domain over the evening meal. (Studies of hunter gatherer societies show that the most efficient hunters had 15 – 20 years’ experience, emphasizing the long learning curve for these skills.) More recently, the teaching of trades was formalized by the guilds: young aspirants were first assistants, sweeping, cleaning up, and running errands while learning the language of that trade. They were then apprentices working under a master who explained the tasks and criticized each apprentice’s work where needed. Upon “graduation” they became a journeyman, allowed to do small tasks on their own or to supervise apprentices under the direction of a master. Finally, upon submission of a masterwork, they became masters of their trade. (The parallel with undergraduates, graduate students, post-docs, and tenured faculty is obvious.)
Tutoring is widely regarded as the best form of education. Even employees at Pearson Education (the largest provider of educational materials like textbooks and online educational technology) overwhelmingly feel that the best education for their children would be a personal tutor.
Therefore, when the PI and his son decided to make an online educational platform, their goal was to emulate a personal tutor that would have a dialog with the student as opposed to a one-way transfer of information, teacher –> student, like a video lecture or a textbook.
Mastering is the closest to making a tutor that the PI or RELATE have come. We have kept the “Tutoring” in the RELATE name (rather than change it to “teaching”) because reaching our goal will be aided when both online and in-person interactions with students emulate that of a personal tutor. Ideally, the online tutor would have a detailed knowledge of the student’s knowledge and the ability to detect specific student errors and provide suitable challenges and personalized tutoring in real time. Similarly, the classroom teacher should be informed of the class’ current needs and how to help them in today’s class.