Challenge:   In 2019, I was trying to find out how to promote online tutoring to tutors, parents and students in Singapore.  Online tutoring in Singapore had not really taken off yet at that time. In fact, everybody had different ideas of  what online tutoring was. Parents were generally skeptical about its usefulness, students mostly did not have a  clear idea of what online tutoring looked like, and most tutors were adopting a “wait-and-see” approach  towards this emerging technology.    There were also multiple factors that affected the adoption rate of online tutoring. Among these are: maturity of  online tutoring software, availability of on-boarding training, cost of subscription of online tutoring software,  effectiveness of learning through online tutoring, cyber security concerns, etc.    My team conducted training for approximately 150 freelance tutors who showed interest in online tutoring but  only a handful of them really adopted online tutoring as part of their offer. We tried to engage parents in a few  parents workshops; they produced only a few customers.    Due to our limited resources, a multi-pronged approach like that was very hard and slow work. The challenge  was really to identify a few critical factors that had maximum impact on the adoption rate of online tutoring in  Singapore, and to act upon them.    Tool selection:  It was mentioned in the Mind Mapping Tool video in this course, “Mind mapping is looking for patterns and  insights in a large quantity of data you collected during your exploration of what is the current reality. The goal  is to establish criteria for the what-if idea generation phase.”    Since my challenge was to make sense of the current situation (“What Is”), I had chosen to use a modified  version of Mind Mapping, called “Systems Mapping”. I learnt this tool from Cobus Mpanza, who also attended  Alexandr Ospina’s Design Thinking course.    Application of the selected tool:  Step 1:​ I started off by writing down all the possible factors that affect adoption of online tutoring, one factor on  a piece of post-it note.     Step 2:​ Then I got a large A1-size paper, and divided it into two sections - “Reinforce” and “Hinder”.     Step 3​: Next, I assess the current state of each factor; if the current state of a factor reinforces the adoption of  online tutoring, I will stick it under the “Reinforce” part of the A1-size paper. The same went to factors which  were currently hindering the adoption of online tutoring. For example, “subscription of online tutoring software”  is a factor. Now the cost was currently considered affordable to most tutors, so I placed the post-in note of this  factor under the “Reinforce” section.    Step 4​: Once we have all the factors categorized in either “Reinforce” or “Hinder” section, I started to draw  lines to link up factors that either drove another factor, or was driven by another factor.    Step 5​: The final step in System Mapping is to do a tally. The factors that had the most number of lines going  into and going out of them, are the key driving factors to adoption of online tutoring.    This is a somewhat tidied up version of my Systems Map.

Insight gained:    What I concluded from this exercise confirmed my suspicion, that the key driving factor to online tutoring is  really how tutors perceive it. In 2019, most tutors clearly were not taking online tutoring seriously. The exercise  suggested that by focusing our resources to change tutors’ perception of online tutoring, it would have the  greatest impact on the adoption rate of online tutoring.    Approach:    I found that it was very important that I was able to stand in the position of stakeholders, to come up with as  many factors as possible. It was important to state factors as neutral rather than to add my assessment of it  prematurely, for example, a factor should be “possibilities to access tutors on demand” and not “should be able  to access tutors on demand”. This is something I will pay more attention to in the future.    It was also challenging to hold my bias and assess the current state of things impartially, so that I can place  the factors in the right sections. The tendency was to think that most factors were doing well, and they were  reinforcing the adoption of online tutoring. The truth was that they were not, which was exactly why I was doing  this System Mapping exercise in the first place. This is also something to pay attention to in the future.

