The locally based business that strollers students through 40 of the University of Florida/s toughest courses will soon be accessible online.
Tutoring Zone, which offers review sessions, course packets and individual tutoring for business, mathematics, science, finance and Spanish classes, will begin uploading tutorials and corresponding practice exams onto Facebook, a popular social networking site, later this month.
Students can add the Tutoring Zone application to their personal pages to access materials or be matched with a tutor to prepare for class exams, the Graduate Record Examination, the Graduate Management Admission Test and the Law School Admission Test.
According to owner Matt Hintze, the fall UF course packages will be for Business Finance and Managerial Economics only and will cost between $10 and $20. The "less-than-a-textbook" price can be handled online with a credit card, and sales will determine whether more courses will be added.
"We/re building the best electronic platform we can," he said of the nearly $100,000 project. "I would rather scrap the whole thing than put a standard video on the Internet."
The online tutorials will be broken into sections, allowing students to work at their own paces and select specific parts of a lesson or practice problem. The lessons will feature an interactive green screen and the same 30 "video superstars" who teach the live sessions.
Online materials will also be available to students at the University of Georgia and Florida State University, where Tutoring Zone has its second and third locations, and at two other public universities.
The two additional schools have not been chosen but will only be offered online materials and review sessions. If things go well, Hintze said, Tutoring Zone will open two more locations in one or two years.
While prices at UGA and FSU will mirror those at UF, materials for the new schools will be free.
The Facebook application will also add more high school students to the mix of more than 8,000 graduate-, undergraduate- and high school-aged customers who consume the business each semester.
Online practice exams and lessons will be offered for five standardized Advanced Placement subjects: microeconomics, statistics, chemistry and two levels of calculus. In the past, Advanced Placement students and company tutors have traveled to meet in different areas of the state. They will now have the option of doing so electronically.
Just as college students "need more help than the universities can provide" in mastering difficult subjects, Hintze said, those in Advanced Placement courses are often sold short by their schools.
To ensure that students are receiving complete material, he said, the tutors work "hand-in-hand" with more than half the college and several of the Advanced Placement instructors. Every Tutoring Zone lesson and practice test, the Holy Grail for college students, uses actual problems from the specific courses/ past exams.
However, not all UF faculty are eager to join forces with the outside service.
"Students would be better off not spending the money," said physics department Chairman John Yelton.
UF departments provide plenty of opportunities for students to find help, he said, and "the best way to get information is from the professors who teach the courses."
Yet many student organizations do align with Tutoring Zone. The University of Florida Student Government works with the company to create the tutor-matching service that will become part of the Facebook application.
With the exception of the matching service, which is done on a case-by-case basis, Hintze said the biggest online problem the company faces is figuring out how to limit material to only the student who bought it.
"We know that we can teach, so we/re not concerned about that," he said. "[We/re] worried about five kids sitting in front of a screen and watching a review."
According to Hintze, the project began last winter in effort to bring the company/s tutoring services closer to its existing technology, the GIN System. The system, a networking site used by fraternities, sororities and other college organizations, has the most-used Facebook application in the U.S.
The GIN System is The Gainesville Tutoring Zone, located in a former Publix at 1010 N Main St. It was started in 1999 by Hintze and co-owner Ethan Fieldman, both UF graduates.
According to the company/s Web site, the two train each tutor for three to six months before allowing him or her to teach, and scholarships are available for those who cannot afford Tutoring Zone services. Hintze estimates that 15 to 20 percent of students who use the company/s services do not pay.
"Our quality-control is our biggest marketing" he said. "We may be around forever."
