It’s been about six months since I last wrote. While this is not an epistolary blog, I do feel as if I owe someone a letter. To continue the story of the writing center, the next four tutor training sessions went pretty much the same as the first four. Once I showed the tutors how to find their way around inside Blackboard, and showed them examples of peer reviews that Donald and I had done, they went to work. There were some ebbs and flows, with people leaving and returning from vacations and trips. It required some juggling, and I ended up taking up much of the slack. But it was all good. This was a test drive, after all.
The big whoop dee do occurred in the sixth week of our research project. SMARTHINKING came to our campus, offering training sessions for faculty and staff who planned to use their tutoring service in the fall. The SMARTHINKING trainer demonstrated how SMARTHINKING works, showed us how to access SMARTHINKING services, and how to assist students with using it. Here’s basically how it works (my remarks are paraphrases, sorta, kinda, from SMARTHINKING’s website blurbs):
Live, Online Tutoring
Students can meet with SMARTHINKING e-structors in a chatroom for live, asynchronous help. Students can schedule a session ahead of time or they can just drop in. The e-structors use Whiteboard Technology to demonstrate concepts and answer questions.
Online Writing Lab
Students can email written assignments for a detailed critique from a SMARTHINKING e-structor. Students get feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of their assignments, as well as specific revision suggestions. Students may choose a 30-minute review or a 60-minute review for longer essays.
Essay Scoring
SMARTHINKING e-structors will review student essays and assign a score based on seven writing elements. Faculty can view their students’ essays and e-structor feedback. Instructors may use scores and comments to shape course assignments and feedback for student writers
Hosted Technology
SMARTHINKING licenses its technology platform to clients and provides training and consulting on the delivery of online tutoring programs. Schools can combine their tutors with SMARTHINKING’s online tutors to create a comprehensive online tutoring infrastructure.
SMARTHINKING did five sessions. About 20 people were at the session I attended. When I arrived at my session, Faith and Ellynne were already there. I sat near them and we talked before, during, and after the session (I am a bad, bad, bad student; I would hate to have someone like me in one of my classes). The overall consensus among the three of us was that having online tutoring available through SMARTHINKING was better than no online tutoring at all, which is what we had at the moment.
None of us was pleased with the writing tutoring session they showed us. It was a synchronous chat session, using a whiteboard as the medium. We thought the tutor in the writing demonstration spent too much time on a picky grammar rule and no time on higher order concerns. And the student had major higher order issues. It sounded like faculty would be able to view their students’ sessions, which is probably good. I would want to know if students were getting good suggestions. Students are allocated only two hours of tutoring per semester. If they need more hours, they will have to pay for it themselves. It’s $34.99 per hour but they would have to order a minimum of two hours, for $69.98. Few of our students can afford their prices. The college has said maybe we could work something out where students who needed more time could use hours from students who weren’t using the service. We’ll see.
Faith had to leave after awhile, but I stuck around and talked to Ellynne and another writing tutor. Later in the week, I talked to Etta. The tutors had a much stronger reaction to SMARTHINKING than I did. They hated it. It was too impersonal. They weren’t impressed by the tutoring session demos. They thought that two hours per student would not be enough time for students who need tutoring the most. They wanted to know what would happen to the hours students didn’t use. They were concerned about the cost (we all felt that the college should have spent the money on our own tutors and tutoring centers). I promised the tutors that I would bring this issue up at the next Teaching and Learning with Technology meeting on July 11, which I’ll talk about in my next installment.
It was not your imagination. SMARTHINKING is run by a sort of bitter coffee clatch of old ladies who are resentful of any person who is truly educated. I worked with them briefly and chose to resign after I was told that I did my job too well (actually responded with care to each student essay and question) yet did not use the font and color and bulleting that they wanted and so should be “retrained.” This was such a disappointment because it could work. I know that I actually helped students, but that was discouraged by the service. One was to follow the bitter old ladies’ guidelines for the form used to reply to the students, or else. I was discouraged from actually answering students’ questions and I am a retired university department of English director.
Comment by Barbara Emory, PhD — September 24, 2007 @ 3:58 pm