PROBLEM
20% of university students seek extra academic support while studying for their degree. Tuition and resources are currently sourced through word of mouth, university databases or noticeboards. These methods are time consuming, inefficient and unreliable. There is currently no one place university tutors can advertise where they are sure their target market in a university will see it. More importantly though, university students don’t know where to look if they need extra academic support.
Currently students can spend days trying to find a tutor, and often pay very high rates for professionals in their field to teach them. These private tutors are often not familiar with students’ class specific subject matter, and students are regularly left dissatisfied. In these cases, students have no way to secure refunds as the private tuition market is completely unregulated.
IMPORTANCE FOR SOCIETY
Many university students cannot find the academic support they need at all. This is a big problem in highly specialized courses. This problem affects millions of students worldwide, and is contributing to underperformance and failure rates in universities around the world.
In all of these cases there are in fact numerous people in the university community who could help the students in need of extra academic support. Senior students and recent graduates who have completed and excelled in a class could easily help students to learn the material for that class. However, there is currently no way for these two parties to find each other and communicate.
OBJECTIVES
This innovation project aimed to solve all of these problems. The project aimed to provide university students with an online marketplace for extra academic support. This marketplace would enable all students looking for academic support to easily find suitable tutors, and would enable suitably qualified tutors to easily advertise directly to their target market. Once students have found their ideal tutor, they would be able to book their tutorial immediately through the platform.
The overall project aimed to increase the accessibility of specialist university tutors and learning materials, leading to increased knowledge exchange in university communities. The objectives of the feasibility study were to establish the technical feasibility of additional service features for UniTuition, identify key target markets in Europe and develop a detailed internationalization plan.
Specifically the objectives of the feasibility study were:
- To research the university academic support markets in European countries
- To identify key target markets in Europe
- To identify potential partners to facilitate market entry into universities in European countries
- To establish a number of partnerships in universities in European countries, starting with the UK
- To set up a pilot of the service in a number of these universities
- To establish the market validity of proposed additional service features
- To establish the technical feasibility of proposed additional service features
- To develop a business plan detailing the internationalization of UniTuition into European markets
CONCLUSIONS
TECHNICAL VIABILITY
The feasibility study enabled us to conclude that all proposed technical updates were technically feasible. All but two of these features were deemed to improve product/market fit:
1) The ability for tutors to upload content for students to download for a fee
2) The ability for students to upload documents to be proofread by tutors
3) The ability for students to request group lessons
4) A referral system through which users can redeem rewards for referring other users to the service (abandoned due to low uptake in testing)
5) The ability for tutors to list group lessons slots for students to book into (removed due to low use during the feasibility study pilot)
COMMERCIAL VIABILITY
The results of the research carried out during the feasibility study, including European country breakdown and analysis, partnership research and establishment and pilot launch and execution were unfortunately unfavourable. Increased costs of partnerships, advertising and therefore customer acquisition indicate that the service is not commercially viable with its current business model in any of the European markets researched during the study. The company has now begun to look beyond third level education markets at similar markets that may have less limiting factors, such as second level education or professional examination markets.
