I haven’t posted anything to this blog in ages. My enthusiasm for reading blogs hasn’t transformed me into the prolific blogger I had hoped to become. However, the fact that I don’t write here doesn’t mean that I don’t write at all. I keep a journal for expressing my personal thoughts and I carry with me at all times another journal to write down my teaching experiences and impressions. Some of the material from my teaching journal has made its way into an article I’ve been working on for Inquiry, a Virginia Community College System publication for teachers in the VCCS. What follows today and for several days hereafter, are excerpts from my article in progress.
Prologue: This is a story that chronicles the development of an idea for an online tutoring program. The final stage of development was a research project, “Online Tutoring for Online English,” conducted as part of a VCCS Professional Development Grant project during the spring and summer of 2006.
In the summer of 2001, when I was still a part-time instructor at TCC, my dean asked if I were able and willing to teach a section of ENG 3 online. I hesitated at first—not because I wasn’t somewhat proficient with online technologies; I had been publishing course web sites since 1998 and using Blackboard for my on-campus classes since 2000. The truth was I didn’t believe ENG 3 students had the necessary skills to be successful in an online class. I based my belief on experience with my on-campus ENG 3 students in the classroom computer lab, where I would spend much time showing students basic computing tasks. I assumed that students in an online version of ENG 3 would be similarly challenged, but the chance to teach a course and receive a significant stipend convinced me to give it a try. Since it would be my only class that summer, I would have plenty of time to create additional course materials and work one on one with students.
What I discovered that summer partly supported and partly disproved my assumptions. Students displayed a wide range of computing proficiency. Some students were skillful computer users while others struggled with the most basic computing tasks. I struggled along with my students to find ways to explain how to login to Blackboard, post to the discussion forums, send email, or check their grades. Students’ writing skills varied as well. Some students’ writing showed they were almost ready for ENG 111, while others grappled with serious grammar, spelling, and sentence structure problems. And I grappled for words to unlock their understanding of Standard English.
After that first experience, I continued offering ENG 3 online. I took on another section, on top of the on-campus classes I was assigned, which meant that I wasn’t able to give my online students as much one-on-one help as I had that first semester. Teaching online involves almost twice as much work as on campus teaching, which of course, puts a greater burden on online teachers, which means they have less time and energy to give students individual assistance. I soon realized the need for some kind of tutoring service for my online students. In my on-campus classes, when I see students who need more help, I refer them to the tutoring center on campus, but many of my online students report that they can’t come to campus at all or can’t fit campus visits into their schedule. Many online students are active duty military, some of who take classes while overseas or on cruises. Some students are stay at home parents with no family or friends to watch their children while they’re at school. Some have full time day jobs. Some don’t live in the Hampton Roads area. Some students have told me about physical or psychological disabilities that make coming to campus difficult.
Online courses also have a lower retention and success rate than traditional face-to-face classes. Students give various reasons for dropping or withdrawing from an online course. The reasons cited most frequently in an Online Student Survey conducted by Distributed Teaching and Learning Services in Spring 2006 were “changes in work schedule” (12.5%), “family obligations” (11.1%), and “more work than expected” (11.5%). What was missing from the survey was a question about tutoring support services. The survey asked about student satisfaction with Blackboard services, the Student Information System, student webmail services, and online learning resources and library materials, but not about tutoring. And not one of TCC’s four campuses offers tutoring services online. In the same Online Student Survey, 17.5% of students responding said that the most important reason they were taking online classes was that they could not attend class on campus.
Why, I wondered, in my first year teaching online, didn’t we have the same academic support services for online students that we had for on-campus students? Over the next four years, my desire for an online tutoring service led me to investigate ways to adapt on-campus tutoring to an online environment. In fall 2002, I volunteered to be on a Tutoring Center Task Force and shared my thoughts with the other task force members. I searched for technologies to use. I went office to office making informal inquiries. I exchanged emails with faculty who expressed interest in online tutoring.
Finally, in spring 2005, I had an opportunity to put some of my ideas into practice. I was assigned a supplemental instructional assistant for my on-campus ENG 3 class. Donald worked with my students in the computer lab and in small group, classroom peer reviews until he got a good understanding of how my classes worked. My students liked him and he was very helpful in the lab. The next semester, he wanted to cut back on his hours on campus, so I asked him if he would work with my online students, giving them peer reviews in the Blackboard discussion board. Donald did so well in my online class that I decided to work on a VCCS Professional Development proposal for a research project on online tutoring. That fall, I wrote a proposal for a VCCS Professional Development grant to collaborate with the Writing Center director, Faith Hutchinson, on developing an online tutoring program.
Our original plan was to identify technology that would facilitate online tutoring for students in online writing classes, to evaluate technologies to determine which technology would work best, to determine the best formative assessment practices, to develop training procedures for tutors and to implement online tutoring at the Norfolk campus, and if successful, take it to TCC’s other three campuses. We were advised to extend the research over two semesters, spring and summer 2006. We decided to focus on technology and best practices research for the spring and planned to do tutor training in the summer. For the first half of the spring semester, Faith and I met often to compare notes on our project. About halfway through the spring semester, the college announced that TCC would be using SMARTHINKING in the fall. SMARTHINKING was supposed to be an alternative to our on-campus tutoring services for online students in the 2006-07 academic year. At the time the announcement was made, I thought our research project had suddenly become obsolete.
I talked to Faith about whether we should even continue working on our project. Why search for technology to allow students to receive tutoring help online from our college’s tutors when SMARTHINKING could do the job as well or better? At the end of our discussion, we decided to refocus and continue. We could still use the same methodology but apply it differently. Our new angle would be to have the tutors work with my English 03 class in the Blackboard site. The tutors would be more like in-class supplemental instructional assistants than like drop-in tutors. They would work with the same groups of students all semester and hopefully, develop a rapport with their students that would influence students’ to work on and improve their writing. So for the rest of the spring semester, we continued to research and evaluate technologies and best practices for online writing tutoring and we designed a training program for the tutors. During the summer 2006 semester, we trained the tutors and supervised their online interaction with students. Tomorrow, I’ll post a narrative account of the first training session.
