We started the summer phase of the project with five tutors; Amber, Ellynne, Etta, Glynis, and Lee. Our first meeting was on Wednesday, May 31, about a week into the summer semester. My plan was to keep the training as open-ended as possible. I wanted to get feedback from the tutors themselves because they were the ones who would be on the front lines. I wanted to give them some control over the shape and direction of the project.
I began the first meeting by explaining what we were going to do, what my own perceptions, experiences, and attitudes were about tutoring online, and some of what I hoped to learn from our project. I then asked the tutors to fill out a survey about computer proficiency in a variety of areas so I could get an idea of what skills they had. Glynis, who later was diverted to the main tutoring center, was the most computer proficient, and had done some online tutoring for math via email. Ellynne was the next most proficient. She had been one of my students in English 112, and in that class, she had gained some experience with Blackboard. Lee and Amber’s computing skills were very good. They had also worked with Blackboard. Etta reported the least proficiency and expressed some anxiety about participating in the project.
I collected the surveys, and then I asked the tutors what they thought about the concept of online tutoring. Ellynne thought online tutoring would work well for college level students but not so well for developmental writers. I shared my own experiences with teaching developmental writers online. The tutors were surprised that English 3 students could do well in an online class. This is a common misperception even among English teachers, mainly because they are judging from their experiences with developmental writers in face-to-face classes. Online classes, however, attract many students who can’t take classes on campus. Most of them have adequate computing skills for getting around in a course management system. Students whose skills are not adequate usually drop the class before the drop/add deadline.
After we talked about our perceptions of the project, I gave the tutors some suggestions about how we could approach tutoring online. I told them about an experience from two semesters back, in which Donald, one of our former tutors, had been assigned to my on campus English 3 class as an instructional assistant. Donald had worked with my students in the computer lab (he has good skills) and in small group, classroom peer reviews until he got a good understanding of how my classes worked. The next semester, he worked with my online students, giving them peer reviews in the Blackboard discussion board. I told the tutors that the work I did with Donald had given me the idea to work on this project.
I said I thought that we could take turns doing revision peer reviews in the Discussion Board—one tutor per week. Ellynne felt that it would be best for the tutors to work throughout the semester with the same students so they could develop relationships with them. I agreed, and we decided to group the students in clusters and assign one tutor per cluster. Before I left, I showed the tutors around my Blackboard site, enrolled them all in the site as teaching assistants, and told them they could go in anytime to look around and get a feel for the Blackboard environment. I also printed out one of the forums so the tutors could see how students were responding to each other.
