What is Ask An Expert?

Ask An Expert is a Q&A community that allows students to submit questions they’d like to have explained by tutors listed on Wyzant.

You can help students by answering questions anytime via text or video answers. Replies include your profile photo and a prominent link to your Wyzant profile, so it’s easy for any student to visit, and reach out to a tutor who finally helped them reach their “aha!” moment and book their first lesson for more in-depth help.

When you land at Ask An Expert, you’ll see Featured questions relevant to your approved subjects. The most recent unanswered questions will appear first, since we want to help tutors locate students who need the most immediate help. That means you get the opportunity to make the first impression on that student, a great first step towards converting your Ask An Expert answer into a lesson. You can also further filter the results to display the Newest subject-relevant questions, which may include questions with previous answers.

You can adjust how questions are filtered by using the drop-down menu at the top of the page, which has options to filter by Unanswered Questions, Answered Questions, and All Questions.

Students and tutors can Follow a specific question. When a new comment or reply is posted, anyone following the thread will receive a notification. By following a question, you’ll know instantly when a student replies, so you can reply quickly to maximize your engagement with anyone participating in the thread.

Once you’ve found a question that fits your skill set, you can get down to showcasing your expertise using two reply options: a text response or a recorded video answer.

How to answer a question

Some questions are best answered using a simple text reply. The field where you can input a text reply has all of the standard formatting options available in most word processors (alignment, indentation, etc.).

The text editor also has options to add certain mathematical notation (subscripts and superscripts), as well as other symbols and operators (you can find them by clicking the omega symbol “Ω”). Using this allows you to give a student a step-by-step breakdown of an equation, or to list a few points of information needed to address a particular problem.

If the question is about programming, use the code editor! While it cannot compile or run code, this feature can format a text response as plain (default), Bash, C++, C#, CSS, Diff, HTML/XML, Java, Javascript, Markdown, PHP, Python, Ruby, or SQL.

Please note: Image support is not currently built into the functionality of Ask an Expert posts. If you should copy and paste content into the text area, this may work occasionally depending on the size of the file or amount of special characters you're using, however we cannot guarantee the text area will support your pasted image content each time.

For more about recording a video answer, please see this article.