Our Approach

The National Tutoring Observatory is building the first large-scale, open-access dataset of real-world tutoring interactions. By collecting millions of hours of audio, video, and text data, the NTO provides multimodal insight into how educators teach—and how students learn—in real time. The “Million Tutor Moves” (MTM) repository will link every educator move to student outcomes, helping researchers and developers understand what makes tutoring effective, widely accessible, and scalable. Digital learning platforms capture what students do, but not how educators respond. The NTO fills this gap—showing how teachers and tutors guide thinking, build understanding, and support emotional and cognitive growth. This open infrastructure will fuel the next generation of research and AI tools to enhance human teaching and learning.

The NTO community—now comprising more than 300 researchers, tutoring providers, technology developers, and practitioners—has identified annotation and other processing of tutoring interactions as a key bottleneck in improving instructional quality of human and AI-powered tutors. While tutoring providers in our initial NTO cohort—Carnegie Learning, Eedi, PLUS, Saga, Third Space Learning, TeachFX, UPchieve—collectively serve hundreds of thousands of students, their ability to transform tutoring data into actionable insight is constrained by limited infrastructure for scalable, privacy-preserving annotation tools.

Reliable “ground truth” data is essential for understanding effective tutoring, but traditional human annotation is slow, inconsistent, and prone to error. Ambiguous tasks (e.g., what counts as a hint), subjective judgments (e.g., patience or frustration), and simple mistakes (e.g., fatigue or mis-clicks) all reduce quality. NTO tools simplify this process with AI-assisted workflows that support feedback, iteration, and consistency—empowering researchers and developers to generate and scale reliable insights.

We partner with tutoring providers, school districts, practitioners, researchers, and privacy experts to build, test, and scale infrastructure that matters to educators and students.