Academia In British academic parlance, a tutorial is a small class of one, or only a few, students, in which the tutor (a lecturer or other academic staff member) gives individual attention to the students. The tutorial system at Oxford and Cambridge is fundamental to methods of teaching at those universities, but it's by no means peculiar to them (although it's rare for newer universities in the UK to have the resources to offer individual tuition--six to eight students is a far more common… (More on Tutorial)