Online Tutoring? 17
Daanji asks: "Being a struggling Electrical Engineering student at Northern Arizona University I have taken on a Math tutor job to support myself at the Learning Assistance Center. Being one of the few computer literate tutors on staff, I have been asked if I wanted to participate in online tutoring. This trial will begin with moderate means, consisting of Microsoft Netmeeting (which almost everyone has on their machines), a digital pen, and hopefully Mathematica, Maple, or some other math program. I've also been asked to think about how to fully implement this idea to its full potential to provide students with an acceptable service. What I would like to know is if anyone has been involved in a similar situation. What technologies have any of you used (software or hardware) to implement a similar system: what works best, what doesn't, how effective was it, and how much did it cost? Was your experience successful or worth the effort? Any suggestions or constructive criticisms, helpful hints, or links would be appreciated."
usenet (Score:3, Funny)
"Do my homework"s, sometimes dressed-up as "I'm writing this cool open source program to, uhh, transfer the contents of these three towers in Vietnam, and uhh, I just need some help with, uhh, teh high level algorithm."
Ubiquitous net meeting? (Score:2)
consisting of Microsoft Netmeeting (which almost everyone has on their machines),
Who told you that?
I would say that most people don't have net meeting. But even if they did, is it realy what you want? I'd think even just e-mail, or some sort of wiki would be much better.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Ubiquitous net meeting? (Score:2, Informative)
You'll be missing face-to-face contact (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm wondering how much thought has been put into this project. All the people who I tutored really appreciated someone sitting down with them and helping them out. A lot of the time, they are actually smart enough to work things out themselves, they just need some moral support and hand-holding to reassure them. I think that kind of personal contact is going to be missing if you do this online.
I'm also wondering what the point of doing this online is? What is the expected benefit? Is a tutor going to be helping multiple student clients at a single session? If so, then you'll probably have the problem that more shy students won't get a chance to ask their questions. Is it to help people who can't -- for whatever reason -- attend regular tutoring hours on campus? Well, these people have to decide how serious they are about getting help. I see drawbacks to online tutoring and don't see any immediate advantages over the normal means.
Another important aspect of offline tutoring is that you will get some idea as to whether any of your help is sinking in. When you explain something, you want to look that person in the eye (or at least look at their face if they are reluctant to make eye contact) and look for clues that they are actually understanding or are just claiming that they understand to avoid looking dumb. I don't see how you are going to get these clues online. If you type "Do you understand?" and they type back "Yeah.", it's not at all clear whether they actually do or are just saying that.
Since the university seems to have dumped this in your lap, it's an opportunity for you to think through some of these issues and report back to them, possibly with suggestions. First you should run some of these concerns by them to see if they have any answers. If not, then you will have pointed out to them some of the difficulties and potential drawbacks of their approach. About now you may be feeling "Hey, I just wanted to tutor. I didn't sign up to develop some new teaching methodology." While that's true, if you can provide some guidance to the tutoring organization to help them improve their methods (and they are suitably impressed with your inputs), you may be able to use them as references for job hunting or grad student applications. Never pass up an opportunity to show someone how smart you can be!
Good luck,
GMD
XMX? (Score:2)
http://www.cs.brown.edu/software/xmx/
Some thoughts. (Score:2)
What about something along the lines of citrix/terminal services + voice over IP + multicasting, and having the students sit back and look at your screen, then changing modes so they get back their screen control, and YOU get a view of THEIR screen, while everyones linked up with voice.
Much better is a dark slide room with a computer+projector. I have never thought of online tutoring as a success unless it is self-reading.
Licensing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sass (Score:2)
I got one of those too. To XOR you click it.
My wife tutors kids over eSylvan. (Score:1)
My wife uses a nice setup with a Java Applet front end and a J2EE (as far as I can tell) backend for Esylvan (http://www.esylvan.com [esylvan.com]) and enjoys it a lot.
Whether this is a good model or not, I have no idea, but she does get paid.
NetMeeting doesn't work through NAT or firewalls (Score:4, Informative)
Why would this be a problem? What if the dorm rooms are behind a firewall? What if the whole university is behind a firewall, and someone (a commuter, not a resident student) wants to connect from home? What if university doesn't have a firewall, but the commuting student does at home (cable modem + Linksys)? NetMeeting won't work in those situations. There are descriptions of how to make it work, but they're complicated enough to be useless to almost everyone. The Windows XP VoIP platform is based on SIP, which has similar problems.
The only solutions are: use a firewall and/or NAT router that understands your VoIP protocol (I only know one that handles H.323, and I know of work on SIP for this but haven't heard of any solutions), avoid firewalls, or avoid VoIP.
Source: Four and a half years developing a major commercial H.323 gatekeeper (call control software), which interoperated with terminals (including NetMeeting) and gateways.
I use Glance (Score:2, Informative)
Email (Score:4, Informative)
Since I quit tutoring when my daughter was born I've had several students come back to me for help, and the vast majority of that has been through email. It works just fine, and yes I do mean for math.
One of the problems with using Netmeeting boils down to the question of why these students can't make it to regular tutoring sessions? If it's because of time constraints, then this solution isn't going to help them much either. If it's a distance issue, like if your school has satalite campuses a significant distance away, then the school needs to put forth the effort to find tutors who live in that area and give them a space to work in, or they need to pay an existing tutor for their travel time to serve that campus. In short, every possible effort should be made to facilitate face-to-face contact between student and tutor. If it's an issue of students who just have occasional questions and don't need a regular tutor session, my school has a Math Lab which serves this purpose wonderfully. It's a room with several tables, tons of whiteboard space, and at least one tutor on duty at all times (7am-8pm, IIRC). At peak times we had 2 tutors on duty, although it was a great hangout place for the people who worked there so there were usually 3 or 4 tutors available if things got crazy. If one student was taking up too much time, we would suggest that they go next door to the tutor center and make a regular tutoring appointment. This was also a convenient place for study groups to meet. At satalite campuses we had a few open hours a week where a tutor would be available, but that really didn't work as well as the lab.
I have already stated that tutoring over email worked fine for me, but the devil is in the details. All of these students were people that I had an existing relationship with; some of them I had tutored face-to-face for 3 or 4 semesters and some are friends I have known for 10 years or more. In short, we know each other. I have a good sense of their learning style and the kinds of metaphors and such that will work for them, and they in turn have a good sense of my communication style, and likely already had or were familiar with my reference materials (the prof who ran the math lab made up some really great cheat sheets for algebra, geometry, trig, and calc that I always kept copies of for my students). When it comes down to it, face-to-face is always better.
Anyway, what I would suggest for your situation is usenet. Set up a newsgroup for your schools math department. If you have something like a math lab, set up a machine for the tutors to use to answer newsgroup questions, hopefully with some sort of automatic alert for new messages, and maybe also get some of the teachers to dedicate some time to answering questions there as well. A newsgroup could serve many of the situations I've listed above. If someone is assigned to check on it regularly it can be very responsive, while at the same time serving those who can't participate during normal hours. It also serves as a database of answers for someone who has a question which has already been answered, and threads are good for bringing together people who are having the same issues, sort of like a per-problem study group. It also makes it easy for others to answer questions, removing a great deal of the burden from the tutors, and provides a convenient forum for announcing events (math contests, math club meetings, etc) and organizing study groups.
Most importantly, though, it doesn't require a fast net connection. As nice as it may be to be able to use something like maple or mathematica over netmeeting, I think you'll be excluding a lot of people just through the connection requirements to make that work well.
Notice also that I said usenet and not http-based discussion group. While those are all well and good, and work well in some circumstances, they are slow over dialup and can be irritating to navigate. That sort of overhead is something you simply don't need.
Writing centers (Score:1)
Kudos to you for giving a darn about the quality of your tutoring, and doing some work on this project.
Do some Googling and see what is happening at writing centers, which provide the same services you will be doing, but for writing instead of math. There are already several centers (like Colorado State [colostate.edu] and Auburn [auburn.edu]) who are using chat for writing help online. You might be able to find some general suggestions for tutoring practices which can help you out.
You might also see what folks in electronic library reference are doing, such as the RefeXpress [ufl.edu] service here at Florida.
If you have a minute, I'd appreciate an email regarding what you find out, how it helps you out, etc. (speaking not only of these suggestions but your research in general).
good luck,
cbd.