ResearchBuzz

Online tutor database WyzAnt has expanded into a variety of new markets. Before the site was focused on Boston, Washington DC, and New York City. The database now includes listings for several new markets including San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, Miami, and Chicago. At this time there are over 1600 tutors in the database.

The database’s Web site is http://www.wyzant.com/ . You can search by zip code/radius, or you can browse by subject (main categories are Academics/Music/Computers/Others.) Tutor information includes name, location, and what looks like self-submitted descriptions. Tutors also have individual pages which include travel radius, description/mini-bio, experience, certification, and expertise. I found a guy who tutors in both trombone and poker. I found another who tutors in bass and ESL. Interesting groups of expertise.

Once you’ve found a tutor you like, you can contact them through the site and even purchase tutoring lessons through the site.

When I read that you could complete a purchase through the site, I thought, “Uh-oh,” but WyzAnt belongs to the BBB and does link to a BBB report with no complaints. But looking at that BBB report, I wish the search engine offered BBB reports on the tutors listed here, or at least the ability for visitors to post reviews. WyzAnt does offer a guarantee for tutors, and states in its FAQ that tutors are given background checks, but I’d still like to see more student feedback.

School’s back in session! Looking for educational offerings for your kids? Family Education has launched a new “printables” center, available at http://printables.familyeducation.com/ .

The site allows you to pick an age range (from 0-3 to 12-18 — 12-18 is kind of a wide range, isn’t it?) and a category (including Art & Music, Skill Builders, and Coloring Pages) to get a list of available pages. You can also look at lists of popular pages that are available at the front of the site.

I looked at Forms & Charts for 7-11 years old and found charts in a variety of categories, including Genealogy, Learning Disabilities (including a symptoms chart for Asperger) and even lunchbox notes. Click on the name of a printable and you’ll get a little description of the chart and an invitation to view/download it.

Unfortunately in order to get to the printable you do have to register. This is more annoying than invasive but it IS annoying. You’ll have to provide an e-mail address. The site’s privacy policy is here; nothing is untoward but the site has one of those annoying deals where they precheck newsletter boxes, presuming on your behalf that you want to read what they have to offer. EIGHT newsletters. Um.

After (providing an e-mail address, carefully unclicking all eight newsletter boxes, and) registering, I clicked on View Printable and got a PDF file that was, in fact, printable.

I found a surprising variety of resources here, though some of them seemed rather out of the stated scope (why do the 7-11 year olds need the “Appreciating Your Spouse Quiz”?) and the registration process is annoying. If you’re a teacher and a homeschooler you might find some cool stuff here.

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If you’re looking for distance learning opportunities, be sure to check out http://www.distance-education.org/, a directory of distance education opportunities.

You can browse through categories or you can use pulldown menus from the front page to specify a category (and concentration), the type of certification you want (certificate, online degree, etc.) and whether you want to sort the results by most or least expensive (or don’t sort them at all.)

I decided I wanted a certificate in electronics engineering, no sort. No results. There wasn’t anything short of a bachelor’s for electronics engineering. I tried again, looking for an associate degree in marketing and sales.

I got two results, which give you the name of the institution and the cost right off the bat, so your eyeballs can waste no time bugging out of your head. After that you’ll get an extensive description of the degree and credit cost, and a bit of description about the institution itself (descriptions are only marginally fluffy.) All the listings I saw also showed the names of the institutions accreditors. I recognized none of these so had to search for them. (“Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology” site:gov told me plenty.)

With each listing I saw there was also a link to request additional information, which was usually a form from the institution.

There was other interesting information on the site but it required a bit of digging in the site map. There’s a listing of distance education schools, for example, a few school reviews (would probably be more but this page seems kind of buried) and a set of distance education articles.

Worth a look, though I wish there were more courses available.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .