Online Tutoring FIG Minutes
Minutes:
Minutes of the First Meeting of the Online Tutoring FIG
March 24, 2010 in Room 455, 9:30-10:30
Present: Michael Thompson, Angie Magallon, Ramona Silver, Wanda Wong, Cristina Moon, Michael Langdon
At the beginning of this meeting, I distributed this list of questions that I thought we would discuss at our first meeting:
1. How can we gather information about the discipline-specific learning needs of our students (especially when we don’t have representation from every discipline)? Do we have to focus on every discipline, or just the disciplines that will be involved in our pilot?
2. How are we going to do “external research” about online tutoring in our disciplines?
3. Do we want to further investigate the “free” online tutoring option that Marcia Corcoran discovered?
4. When/how can we meet again? How can we arrange something that is convenient to more participants?
Question 4 was addressed first. Ramona said that Lisa could set up a conference call and that Lisa perhaps should be participating in this FIG. We also discussed the possibility of having Friday meetings or having asynchronous meetings via Blackboard.
With regard to Question 1 (regarding the discipline-specific learning needs of our students), Michael Thompson suggested that we focus on our individual disciplines but come up with a template that is broad enough that other disciplines could adopt it.
We considered whether or not we have representation from enough disciplines. We have instructors from world languages, English, history, psychology, humanities, computer science, and business. We would like to have someone from math. I agreed to contact Ming, Tram, or Cindy Stubblebine to see if we can get a math instructor to join us. (There seems to be room in the budget for this since I accidentally accounted for seven participants and we only have six.) Wanda suggested that Jonathan Tragott might be a good person to have on this FIG.
We discussed the fact that this online tutoring program would assist not just online students but students in all of our classes.
I explained that Marcia had told me that another college has set up online tutoring through CCC Confer, which is free. The proposal for our online tutoring FIG estimates that one year of TutorTrac will cost $6,000. Wanda questioned this and said that $6,000 seemed very cheap to her. She wondered if there is a cap on the number of students who can be served for $6,000.00.
In order to assess the discipline-specific tutoring needs of our students, it was suggested that we survey our colleagues, our students, and our tutors.
Ramona suggested that there are general skills that our students lack across the board that apply to all disciplines, including critical reading skills, critical thinking skills, and writing skills. Writing skills are especially important for online students.
Someone wondered how online tutors would be different from the learning assistants who work in our classes. We agreed that these learning assistants are far more familiar with the specific content of their course, whereas online tutors need to be able to offer assistance to students in any course.
We wondered what tutoring of reading looked like (and how it might work online). It was suggested that tutors offer general help with reading strategies rather than help understanding specific texts. Michael Thompson said that it has been his observation that if the answer to a question is too general, students aren’t interested. Sometimes they just want to know the answer. Oftentimes we have to use the specific to teach the general.
Someone wondered whether or not the same reading strategies apply to textbooks in all disciplines. Will the strategies that we use with students for humanities or social science textbooks also apply to science textbooks?
Someone recalled a presentation that Ming had done on reading skills and math/science textbooks and suggested that we invite him to join our group and/or attend one of our meetings so that we might question him about this.
Ramona suggested that we might have three types of tutors: science, math, and reading.
The expectations of our tutors will need to be defined clearly.
Wanda said that there might be three tiers to the tutoring process: (1) a greeter who will talk to the student, figure out his/her needs, and refer the student to a tutor in a specific discipline; (2) a tutor in a specific discipline who would try to answer the student’s question; (3) a more specific tutor like a learning assistant assigned to a specific course. Someone joked that this was starting to sound like customer service over the telephone.
We discussed whether the tutoring would be synchronous or asynchronous. If done through a discussion board, what would be the turnaround time for the student asking the question? If students have to wait too long for answers to their questions, they might not be interested. Ramona suggested that we talk to Abdullah about setting up an in-house live chat without using external software.
Michael Thompson wondered whether or not it was possible to set up tutoring through Blackboard, but most of us thought that this would only serve students in online or Blackboard-enhanced classes. Wanda wondered whether or not it would be possible to enroll every Chabot student in a tutoring course.
I wondered how students who were seeking help understanding specific texts could share those texts with the tutors in an online format. Michael Thompson said that most textbooks are available online now, though this wouldn’t be of much use for English classes, which don’t use textbooks. Several people suggested that tutors can’t really offer much help with specific texts anyway and that these are the kinds of questions that teachers should deal with during office hours. This led to a discussion of the kinds of questions students can bring to tutors. Angie wanted to know if online tutoring programs, such as TutorTrac and CCC Confer, set up parameters that help students phrase their questions in a way that tutors can respond to. I said that I would ask Jan or Dennis about this.
At 10:30, a class needed room 455 and we had to adjourn quickly. We didn’t set up a time for our next meeting, but in the hallway Ramona said she would talk to Lisa about setting up a conference call or a Blackboard discussion board.
Minutes for the Second Meeting of the Online Tutoring FIG
Friday, April 16, 2010 via Conference Call
Present: Michael Thompson, Jan Novak, Wanda Wong, Cristina Moon, Michael Langdon, Aldrian Estepa
I started by reviewing a memo that Jan Novak wrote about her conversation with Ray Sanchez at Fresno City College. Fresno City College wasn’t happy with Ask online, and they were also unhappy with Tutor Track. After giving up on Tutor Track, they used their own customized software for a while and then went to Wimba (a type of software that Cristina recommended to all of us via email). Jan said that using Wimba would cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cristina pointed out that Pronto is a new Wimba product. She remembers learning from Wimba that it would only cost $5,000 per year to use this software, but the process for getting set up would be complicated.
We then moved to the question of whether or not we can do online tutoring without voice. Jan did a survey a while back that showed that 35% of students would be happy with text only communication, and 65% wanted to be able to talk to a tutor by voice. Jan pointed out that the survey was only of five online sections.
Michael Thompson said that “text only” could mean a wide variety of things: email, chat, a discussion board. He thinks that some of these options are “more conversational” than others. Cristina thinks that for certain subjects, voice could be extremely helpful. With more complex questions, students might find it easier to ask their questions with voice.
Wanda agreed to talk to Ming about joining our FIG.
We then moved back to our conversation about the discipline-specific learning needs of our students vis a vis tutoring. Michael Thompson said that he had been doing some history-specific tutoring for the past few semesters. In his experience, students seek assignment-specific help from tutors. When he tried to introduce general principles that they could use for all kinds of learning situations, they weren’t interested. Jan and I both said that we had had similar experiences. Jan said she had learning assistants in her online classes last fall who functioned more or less as tutors, and they were asked these kinds of assignment-specific questions. Michael Thompson pointed out that students often don’t know what their basic skills learning needs are, and if offered workshops on reading skills, for instance, many of them think they don’t need these workshops. It’s only when they have difficulty with a specific assignment or exam that they realize that they need help. This is why the tutoring needs to be discipline-specific, because students who get general basic skills advice are not likely to find it helpful and may not come back. Cristina said that when students go to get help, they want help right away. The students who go to PATH are seeking help with specific assignments.
I said that I wondered what kinds of guidelines tutors were given for working with students. Wanda said that we don’t want tutors giving out answers or working problems for students. I wondered whether or not there were guidelines for the tutors that we have on campus. I mentioned that Angie had raised this question at the last meeting and wanted to know if these online tutoring programs set any parameters for students so that they could ask questions that tutors are allowed to answer.
Wanda said that the tutors need to be trained to ask the right questions of the students so that the students understand why they’re “stuck.”
Michael Thompson said that this would have to be part of the discipline-specific training. He said that he had been using chat in his online class this semester, and that his learning assistant, after observing him asking questions of his students in chat, was able to lead online discussions herself asking the same kinds of questions. Any tutor has to be taught how to “lead students to those answers without providing the answers themselves.”
Wanda said that faculty within each discipline need to mentor tutors within their discipline to teach them to ask these kinds of questions. Cristina said that world languages has a tutor-training program of this sort. She said that she noticed that students seek tutoring without bringing the materials that they were working on. So Cristina created “help folders” with the ten most difficult problems that students have, along with activities that tutors could use to help students with those problems. She also had tutors go to observe classes so that they could watch teachers teach and answer questions.
Michael Thompson said that tutors need to realize their limitations. Sometimes they should say, “I’ve helped you as much as I can. Now you need to go talk to your instructor.”
I wondered about the training that tutors are currently getting and said that the training that we give to online tutors is probably not that different from the training that our current tutors are getting. Jan said that when she began talking to Dennis about this a while back, her understanding was that we would use the same tutors that we currently have on campus and just train them to provide the same kinds of help online.
Michael Thompson said that the degree to which tutors are trained in specific disciplines varies across the campus. Some really good history students have been recommended to be tutors, and these students know the classes they’ve taken really well but haven’t been trained to give broader help to history students. He wondered if we were talking about tutors or learning assistants. I said that we were talking about tutors but that there was overlap. Michael Thompson said that he was trying to figure out what broader knowledge tutors would need that would apply to history in general.
Wanda wanted to know if any of the software we were considering would allow the student and the tutor to look together at a problem.
Michael Thompson, Cristina, and Wanda all said that they’d like to see a demonstration of the tutoring program at another college.
I said that I wanted us to be able to look at tutoring programs together. I will try to contact some other colleges and ask if we can have access to their tutoring programs. But
I said that I thought we should have a live meeting so that we can look at these programs together.
Cristina had to leave at this point.
Aldrian asked if we could find out what features other colleges were looking for when they adopted programs. I said that Jan had put together a list of questions to ask other colleges when we approach them. Jan said that we should definitely talk to other colleges, and that the man she had spoken to at Fresno City College gave her a list of other colleges that we should talk to.
Michael said that he wouldn’t know what questions he has until he sees how some of these programs work.
Jan said that we could have a demonstration of Tutor Track, and that we could probably do the same with Wimba.
Jan suggested that it might be helpful for the people in this FIG to write up what they think are the ten most common questions that would be brought to a tutor. This would help us figure out what kind of software we would need to address these questions. Wanda said that we could also ask our current tutors what the most common questions were.
I mentioned that we had talked about designing a survey of faculty, but that we might also survey our tutors.
I asked what else we might ask tutors and teachers in a survey. Jan said that she would want to ask whether online and on campus students have different needs. Wanda said that we could do a survey of online and on campus LAs to find out if students are bringing different kinds of questions to them.
I said that I wanted to see a demo of Ohlone or whatever college it is that’s using CCC Confer. The good thing about CCC Confer is that it has voice, chat, and a whiteboard, and it’s free. Jan said that I could also just call CCC Confer to get information about which schools are using it for tutoring.
Wanda said that she thought we should all be physically in the same room to have a demo of different software. I said I agreed that this was necessary and that we should perhaps have a longer session with multiple demos at some point later in the semester—probably on a Friday.
I brought up the text vs. voice question again. I recalled that Cristina thought voice was important and that Michael Thompson didn’t seem so sure that it was necessary. Michael Thompson said that he wasn’t saying that voice wasn’t important but that there are different types of text communication. His students are constantly texting, and maybe text would work well for some students.
I said that I liked the idea of students having to use writing to ask questions, but that I suspected that a lot of students would be more comfortable using voice. Wanda said that text-based disciplines like English and history are different from some other kinds of disciplines. With math, there are formulas that are hard for students to discuss through text. Michael Thompson said that a white board might make it possible to address these formulas without voice.
I asked whether anyone knew about any of the requirements for getting apportionment. Jan said that the person she spoke to at Fresno City College said that he thought Ed code required that tutoring be synchronous to get apportionment, that it had to be archived, and that it had to be supervised by an instructor. It also has to be secure so that it was clear that the person being tutored was a student. Wanda said that one way to do this might be to have the student log in with a password. Jan said that this was one of the advantages of Tutor Track: it connects to Banner and students can log in with their W numbers. Jan said that there are other interpretations of Ed code and that perhaps a small group should look into this question. She said that we need to figure out what we need to be doing to be effective in tutoring and that that would determine the software we use and that once we decide on software we can discuss any problems with getting apportionment.
I raised the question of future meetings. Ramona sent me a wiki that a committee at LPC was using to have a meeting. I said that I was a little confused by this wiki, but that this is one option for future meetings. We could also have an asynchronous meeting via Blackboard. I also said I wanted to use CCC Confer’s “Meet and Confer” option at some point, though I was concerned that it was too complicated. Jan said that it was challenging for students but that we could probably figure out how to use it for a meeting.