Scattered paper fliers, restrictive campus postings, informal group chats, or online list-servs can compromise privacy and bring only limited success for college students looking to tutor their fellows. The purpose of Theo is to empower these students to easily advertise their tutoring services via a centralized digital platform.
Theo is an online tutoring marketplace within university domains where students can turn subject matter expertise into a sustainable side hustle. By handling bookings, scheduling, and payments on their behalf, the app allows enrolled tutors to focus on teaching while getting discovered by relevant tutees.
Theo is intended for college students with advanced mastery over specific subjects who want to offer their expertise as tutors to peers. The target audience especially includes high-performing, talented undergraduate students who are already acclimated to managing their schedules and priorities. Tutees represent the secondary audience.
The focus of Theo is to streamline the process of tutors advertising and managing the availability of their services. The app empowers tutors to fully control listed offerings tailored to their expertise, pricing flexibility, and schedule commitments. Fluid profile dashboards allow part-time tutors to design recurring or one-off tutoring slots for maximum profitability around dynamic class schedules. Tutors can also use the app to create listings for group tutoring.
Tutors receive notifications on bookings, allowing them to adjust remaining slots. By framing each listing with tutor bios, sample credentials, past review examples, and specialized subjects of expertise, student customers can make informed selections fitting their budget. Meanwhile, location filters combined with slots tagged to specific courses, assignment types, and test timelines maximize relevance. Availability also automatically syncs to a discoverable listings page where tutees filter by subject, level, date, time, and tutor ratings to select the best tutor for them.
Tutor Profiles
- Tutors can create a profile showcasing credentials, qualifications, experience, subjects mastered, courses taught, education details, reviews and ratings, and a photo and/or video introduction
- Flexible profile creation wizard for optimized visibility
- Ability to highlight key subjects, achievements, test scores, and certifications
- Direct university email verification for enrolled status
Tutor Listings
- Self-serve tutor availability listing builder with date and time slots control
- Custom package building (e.g., 5 piano lessons @ $50 total)
- Recurring availability setting for routine slots like weekly help
- Real-time calendar sync reflecting booked sessions
- Tutor manages availability publishing control
Discoverability & Matching
- Advance search and filters for tutees by subject, availability, tutor rating, and pricing
- Browse listings by peak periods like midterms, finals, or exams
- Location-based listings prioritization for campus proximity
- Learner preference-based recommendations
Admin & Ops
- Tutor vetting and screening workflows based on credentials
- Medal and badges benchmark program pathway to incent activity
- Fraud detection mechanisms and blocks
React is utilized for the front end of Theo, providing a responsive and dynamic user interface that enhances the browsing and interaction experience for both tutors and tutees, ensuring smooth navigation and seamless accessibility to the platform’s features.
Java with Spring powers the back end of Theo, facilitating robust server-side functionality and efficient data processing, enabling tasks such as user authentication, database management, and algorithmic matching to be executed with reliability and scalability.
Hosting Theo on AWS EC2 ensures high availability and scalability of the application, allowing it to handle varying loads of user traffic while maintaining consistent performance, and leveraging AWS’s infrastructure for security, monitoring, and management of the app’s deployment environment.
Coming soon!