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What is a cobrowser, and how is it different from screen sharing for online tutoring?

A cobrowser is a live shared browser window: a tool that lets a teacher and a student open the same webpage on the same screen at the same time, and both interact with it. The difference from screen sharing is participation. On a Zoom-style screen share, only the host's mouse and keyboard touch the page; the student sees a video of what you're doing and can comment, but can't click. On a cobrowser, both people share control of a real, running browser — the student can click buttons, type into forms, drag and drop, scroll, and respond on the same page you're teaching from. For online tutoring, that single difference turns watch-the-teacher minutes into do-the-thing minutes, which is what actually moves a lesson.

The word "cobrowser" comes from customer support and sales tools (Surfly, LiveAgent, Salesforce co-browsing), where a support agent and a customer look at the same form together. Online tutoring borrowed the same idea: Koala Go (the platform we work on) and a handful of other virtual classrooms now offer cobrowsing as a first-class teaching surface, with different design choices for how control of the shared page is handed around between teacher and student.

What a cobrowser actually is, under the hood

A cobrowser is not a screenshot, a video, or a recording. It is a real browser that runs in the cloud and streams its rendered output to both participants, with input (clicks, typing, scrolling) flowing back to the same shared instance. From the teacher's side and the student's side, it looks and behaves like a browser tab — because it is one. Both participants share the same live page, each with their own cursor: there's a single underlying webpage, so at any given instant one person is acting on a given element, but control flows naturally — one person finishes dragging something into place, the other clicks the next button — instead of everyone wrestling over a single shared cursor.

Three things follow from that design:

  • The session is shared, not your password. When you open a workbook, a curriculum site, or a worksheet platform inside the cobrowser, the student can work in that same session with you — without you ever handing over credentials or screensharing a login screen. Use it with sites your own plan or teacher license covers; the point is that the student gets to interact with the material in real time, not that you skip a seat you're meant to buy.
  • The page is real, not a picture. Forms work. Drag-and-drop works. Audio in the page works. Videos play. Sites that require interaction (Wordwall, Boom Learning, Quizlet Live, Khan Academy, YouTube embeds, Google Docs) all behave like they would in a normal tab.
  • Devices barely matter. Because the heavy lifting happens in the cloud, what each participant needs locally is a modern browser and a network connection. iPads, Android tablets, Chromebooks, and older Windows laptops all participate equally — the student is not running the site on their device, they're streaming it.

How screen sharing fails for tutoring (the do-the-thing-yourself problem)

Screen share is fine for showing slides to a board of adults. It struggles in tutoring for a specific, repeated reason: the student can't act on what they're seeing. A few concrete failure modes we hear from working tutors every week:

  • Interactive lesson sites become "watch me click." You open Wordwall, drag the correct answer to the box, and the student watches your cursor. The whole point of the activity was for the student to drag. The lesson reverts to passive consumption — exactly what Wordwall (or Boom Learning, or Quizlet) was built to avoid.
  • iPads break screen share comprehension. Zoom and Google Meet's screen share on a 9-inch iPad shrinks every text size down to unreadable. Pinch-to-zoom fights the host's scrolling. Most parents put their 7-year-old on the iPad they already own. The screen share that works on your 27-inch monitor doesn't survive that journey.
  • Remote control is fiddly and tab-specific. Zoom offers "Request Remote Control," which can hand a single application's cursor to a guest. It requires the guest to install Zoom (not the browser version), takes 4-5 clicks to set up, hands control of your whole desktop (not just one tab), and breaks every time you switch applications. A handful of tutors get it working; most give up and just narrate.
  • The student can't type. Asking "type your answer in the box" is the most natural ESL prompt in the world. On a screen share, the student types into chat and you copy it over. The friction is enough that most tutors stop bothering.

None of these are unfixable; tutors who use screen share solve them with workarounds (sending the student a direct Wordwall link to a parallel tab, narrating instead of asking, switching to verbal-only activities). But the workarounds compound: a 30-minute lesson with a young learner loses 3-5 minutes to "let me share my screen again" / "can you see this?" / "type it in chat" — minutes that aren't going to vocabulary.

What changes when you teach on a cobrowser instead

The student stops watching and starts acting. Practically, that means:

  • Interactive lesson sites become interactive again. You open the Wordwall set, the student drags the answer themselves. Boom Learning cards: the student taps the picture. Khan Academy practice problems: the student types into the answer box. Whatever the page was designed to do, the student does it.
  • Real curriculum websites become teachable. ESL tutors on Koala Go teach directly inside the published curricula they already use — Abridge Academy, Crystal Clear ESL, Flip the Classroom, Reading A-Z, Oxford Owl — with the student doing the activities in real time instead of watching the teacher click. Tutors of older students do the same with Khan Academy, Brilliant, Duolingo, or a standard homework portal. (Teach from sites your own plan or teacher license covers, and within each site's terms — the cobrowser changes who can interact with the page, not what you're licensed to use.)
  • Worksheets, PDFs, and live websites stop being three different workflows. Anything that lives on a web page — a YouTube clip, a Google Doc, an embedded form, a Padlet, a Jamboard replacement, a Wordwall, a parent-facing report you're filling in together — goes through the same surface.
  • Tablets become first-class. The student is not screen-sharing your desktop into their iPad; they're touching their own browser. Pinch-to-zoom does what pinch-to-zoom should. Tapping a button taps the button. Reading is readable.

The honest summary, from tutors who switched from Zoom: a cobrowser doesn't make a new kind of lesson possible — it makes the kind of lesson everyone already wanted to teach actually happen. Less narrating what you're doing, more "you try it."

Where screen sharing is still the right tool

We aren't going to pretend a cobrowser replaces screen sharing for everything. Stay on screen share if:

  • You're sharing a desktop app, not a website. A cobrowser only shares a browser. If you're teaching with a desktop installation of GarageBand, Final Cut, AutoCAD, or any locally-installed software, a regular screen share is the only option.
  • You only need a one-way display. A lecture-style explanation where the student is genuinely meant to watch, then ask questions — a screen share with a webcam overlay is the simpler tool. Cobrowsing is for activities, not lectures.
  • You're teaching adult learners who already have their own logins. If your IELTS student has their own paid Brilliant account, a parallel-tabs workflow plus screen share for shared moments is often enough.
  • You're walking through your own dashboard. Showing a parent their child's progress in your tutoring CRM is a one-way display problem. Screen share is fine.

Which online tutoring platforms have a cobrowser, and how they differ

"Cobrowser" here means: a shared browser where both participants can act on the same running page — not a screenshot, not a one-way remote control, not a static image embedded in a whiteboard. A handful of tutoring platforms ship one; they differ mostly in how control of the shared page is handed around. Descriptions below are written to what each vendor's own marketing page says at the time of writing — vendors do ship and remove features, so re-check their pages if a specific behavior matters to your evaluation.

  • Koala Go. Cobrowser is a built-in feature, available on every paid lesson and (with a 10-minute per-session limit) on the free tier. Every participant has their own cursor on the shared page — unlike a Zoom screen-share, where a single remote-control cursor gets passed around and people end up fighting over it. The teacher can give control to one student or to several, or take it back at any point. The session routes through regional infrastructure (North America / Europe / Asia, with separate routing for mainland China) for latency, and the cobrowser lives inside the same classroom as the whiteboard, 3D Playground, scheduling, and worldwide invoicing. There's a section below with more of the Koala-specific behavior.
  • Lessonspace. Ships a feature called Cobrowser (in beta as of mid-2026, per Lessonspace's own marketing). Multi-tab support, the session leader can lock the browser to keep students view-only, and otherwise everyone in the space can click, scroll, and open tabs in the shared window.
  • Vedamo. Ships Co-browser (Vedamo calls it "collaborative browsing") — an embedded browser that hosts and participants navigate together in real time. Vedamo's tutorial states the cobrowser can be used by one user at a time; the host can hand the controller role to a chosen participant rather than having multiple participants act simultaneously.
  • LearnCube, BitPaper, Ziteboard, Whereby. Purpose-built classrooms / whiteboards for tutoring, all with a whiteboard or "board sharing" feature, but no shared-browser feature we could find on their docs at the time of writing. Teachers on these platforms typically share a browser the same way they would on Zoom: a screen share, or a document-upload workflow that flattens the page into the whiteboard.
  • Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams. General videoconferencing. Screen share with optional remote control on Zoom; no shared-browser primitive on any of the three.

If you're trying to tell whether a "cobrowser" feature is a real shared browser or a fancier screen-share, two checks usually settle it: (1) can the student type into a form on the page and submit it, not just point a cursor; (2) is the student genuinely inside your live session — acting on the same running page — rather than watching a relayed picture of your screen. If both answers are yes, it's a real cobrowser. If either is no, it's a remote-control or relay setup.

What a cobrowser is not

  • Not a clone of your local browser. The cobrowser is a separate, cloud-hosted browser. Your bookmarks, your password manager, and your local extensions don't come with it. (For most tutoring workflows this is a feature, not a bug — you don't accidentally share personal logins.)
  • Not unlimited compute. Heavy 3D web games or sites that pin a CPU to 100% will be sluggish in any cobrowser, the same way they're sluggish in a low-end local browser.
  • Not a substitute for the whiteboard. For drawing, annotating worksheets, modeling letter formation, or working through an algebra problem, the whiteboard is the right tool. Cobrowsing is for sites; the whiteboard is for ink. Most full-classroom platforms (Koala Go included) put them side by side and you flip between them inside the same lesson.
  • Not a security or licensing shortcut. If you log in to an account inside a cobrowser, the student is in that session — so use a dedicated tutoring login rather than your personal one, and only on sites whose terms let you teach from your account this way. The cobrowser is for interacting with content together, not for stretching one seat across people a license doesn't cover.

Real classroom workflows tutors use a cobrowser for

From working tutors on Koala Go, the most common day-to-day uses:

  • Teaching inside a published curriculum. Open Abridge Academy, Crystal Clear ESL, or Flip the Classroom; the student does the activities directly. No "share your screen, can you see my cursor" loop.
  • Wordwall, Boom Learning, Quizlet, Blooket, Gimkit. Drag-and-drop and tap-to-answer activities that depend on the student physically acting on the page.
  • Reading practice on leveled reader sites. Oxford Owl, Reading A-Z, Epic. The teacher opens the book; the student reads aloud and uses the audio controls.
  • Math practice with worked examples. Khan Academy, IXL, ALEKS. The student attempts the problem; the teacher sees the same screen and can intervene on the same input boxes.
  • YouTube and video clips. Open a short Super Simple Songs clip or a TED-Ed; the student gets clean audio and can pause and rewind themselves.
  • Filling in shared documents together. A Google Doc, a worksheet, a parent intake form. Both people type into the same fields in real time.
  • Real-world tasks for older students. A business-English student practicing a job application; a teenager being walked through enrolling in a university course site; an adult learner navigating a real government form in English. The cobrowser turns "in real life" tasks into things you can rehearse inside a lesson.

Cobrowser support in Koala Go specifically

A few facts about how Koala Go's cobrowser behaves in practice, in case you're evaluating it:

  • Browser-only. Nothing to install for you or your student. The teacher opens the cobrowser from inside the classroom; the student joins by clicking the same room link they use for the rest of the lesson.
  • Region routing. The cobrowser session is routed through North America, Europe, or Asia, with separate handling for mainland China. As a tutor, you set your default region in settings once; for one-off sessions in another region, you can switch it in the lesson.
  • Per-student control, individual cursors. Each participant has their own cursor on the page, rather than fighting over one shared remote-control cursor the way a Zoom screen-share works. The teacher chooses whether each student starts with control or has to be handed it (a default you set in settings, overridable per student), and can grant or revoke it during the lesson — to more than one student at once. There's one underlying webpage, so at any given moment a single person is acting on a given element; in practice it flows turn by turn (one student finishes dragging a card into place, another clicks the next button), which feels far more natural than wrestling for one cursor.
  • Audio is piped through the lesson's audio device. A YouTube video playing in the cobrowser comes out of the same speaker setup you and the student are already using, with no separate routing.
  • The whiteboard sits next to it, not on top of it. When you want to annotate (circle a paragraph, draw an arrow, model a letter), the lesson canvas opens over the cobrowser. When you're done, both views go back to normal. You're not flipping between two windows.
  • Free vs. Pro. Koala Free includes cobrowser sessions with a 10-minute cap per session so you can try it; Koala Pro ($25.99/month monthly, $21.99/month billed annually) lifts the cap and includes the cobrowser as a standard feature with the rest of the classroom.

How to decide whether you need a cobrowser

A 30-second decision rule that holds up in practice:

  1. Do you teach activities, or do you lecture? If your lessons are mostly you talking and the student listening, you don't need a cobrowser; a clean screen share is enough. If the student is supposed to do things during the lesson — drag, type, click, drop, drill — and they currently can't because the activity lives on a website only you can interact with, a cobrowser is the missing piece.
  2. Do your students learn on tablets? If most of them are on iPads, Android tablets, or Chromebooks, screen share is the wrong primitive and you'll feel the friction every lesson. Cobrowsers are device-agnostic in a way screen shares aren't.
  3. Do you depend on published or interactive web content? Wordwall, Boom Learning, Khan Academy, leveled reader sites, ESL curriculum portals — if any of those are core to your teaching, you'll get value out of a cobrowser within the first lesson.

If you answered "yes" to any of those, the right move is to run a real lesson on a cobrowser-equipped classroom and see what changes. You can open a free Koala Go room at classroom.teachwithkoala.com — no install, no card — and try it with a real student on the device they actually use. Questions about how it'd work for your specific subject, age range, or region: write to koala@teachwithkoala.com with a sentence about the kind of tutoring you do and we'll give you our honest read.

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