VTutor for High-Impact Tutoring at Scale: Managing Engagement and Real-Time Multi-Screen Monitoring with P2P Connections

TL;DR

VTutor is a web-based platform that uses peer-to-peer screen sharing and virtual avatars to enable a single tutor to monitor and support multiple students simultaneously, improving engagement and responsiveness in hybrid tutoring at scale.

Contribution

This paper introduces VTutor, a novel system combining multi-screen monitoring, AI-powered avatars, and real-time feedback to enhance large-scale hybrid tutoring effectiveness.

Findings

Enables tutors to monitor multiple students' screens simultaneously.

Uses virtual avatars to sustain student engagement.

Facilitates proactive intervention for off-task or struggling students.

Abstract

Hybrid tutoring, where a human tutor supports multiple students in learning with educational technology, is an increasingly common application to deliver high-impact tutoring at scale. However, past hybrid tutoring applications are limited in guiding tutor attention to students that require support. Specifically, existing conferencing tools, commonly used in hybrid tutoring, do not allow tutors to monitor multiple students' screens while directly communicating and attending to multiple students simultaneously. To address this issue, this paper introduces VTutor, a web-based platform leveraging peer-to-peer screen sharing and virtual avatars to deliver real-time, context-aware tutoring feedback at scale. By integrating a multi-student monitoring dashboard with AI-powered avatar prompts, VTutor empowers a single educator or tutor to rapidly detect off-task or struggling students and intervene proactively, thus enhancing the benefits of one-on-one interactions in classroom contexts with several students. Drawing on insight from the learning sciences and past research on animated pedagogical agents, we demonstrate how stylized avatars can potentially sustain student engagement while accommodating varying infrastructure constraints. Finally, we address open questions on refining large-scale, AI-driven tutoring solutions for improved learner outcomes, and how VTutor could help interpret real-time learner interactions to support remote tutors at scale. The VTutor platform can be accessed at https://ls2025.vtutor.ai. The system demo video is at https://ls2025.vtutor.ai/video.