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March/April
2003 - IVC Tutor
By: Teri Karpman of the Illinois
Virtual Campus
Keywords: Tutor,
Illinois Virtual Campus, Student Support, Online Education, Distance
Education
A tutor is defined as “one who gives additional
or special instruction.” Tutoring is the one-on-one exchange of information
to help students achieve their highest potential. Traditional students have
utilized tutoring for years with face-to-face interaction or group activities
to help them better understand concepts and ideas presented in their course
work. More and more students are leaning toward a non-traditional method
of study – Internet or other distance education options. Illinois colleges
and universities reported a total of 116,549 student course enrollments in
distance education during 2000-2001 and 165,698 student course enrollments
during 2001-2002. This is a 42% increase from the previous
year. Internet course enrollments continued to greatly increase, rising from
46,678 in 2000-2001 to 81,454 in 2001-2002, an increase of 75%.
With more students choosing these options, the standard face-to-face tutoring
model must be transformed and offered in a suitable manner.
The Illinois Virtual Campus (IVC) has been a leader in providing student
services for the distance learner. It has offered online student services
from its Website since its inception. Currently, the IVC has taken the lead
and embarked on a new program to enhance its online student services. This
program is the IVCTutor (http://www.ivctutor.info/).
IVCTutor is a Web-based tutoring system that uses qualified college tutors
to answer students’ questions through chat rooms or via email on the
Internet. The program design allows it to be accessible to students at anytime
from anywhere. Tutoring is available in a variety of college subject areas
including Math, English, Computer Science, Social Sciences, and Science and
even preparing for the GED Exam. This statewide program can serve as a model
for other states interested in offering online tutoring to its students.
Why Online Tutoring?
Every college and university that provides online instruction to students
living at a distance is required by the North Central Association (NCA) to
provide support services for these students that are comparable to those provided
to students on-campus. IVCTutor helps meet this mandate. Even without the
mandate, IVCTutor would be a worthwhile endeavor. For example, any students
who take courses on-campus but spend a limited amount of time on-campus (commuting
students, evening students, etc.) can also use online tutoring rather than
being forced to adhere to a campus schedule. Below are just a few more of
the reasons for colleges and universities to provide online tutoring for their
students:
- 15% of all online enrollments at Illinois colleges and universities
live outside of Illinois.
- 12% of all online enrollments at Illinois community colleges live outside
the community college districts.
- Online students living in Illinois or in a college district take online
courses because they cannot easily get to campus. These students cannot
get to campus for tutoring services.
- Many students taking on-campus courses would find it much more convenient
to use online tutoring.
- Students using the GED Online program have a very real need for synchronous
online tutoring when issues arrive rather than when they are able to
come to campus.
What are some of the activities and resources on IVCTutor?
Students can:
- Ask their question as an email (tutor-mail or t-mail within the system).
The answer from the tutor will be a t-mail back to the student on the
IVCTutor system, however the student will get a regular email notifying
him/her that a message is waiting for him/her on IVCTutor.
- Go to the live chat room on IVCTutor to ask their question from the
tutors that are online. This enables a synchronous interaction between
the student and the tutor that is often necessary to understand either
the question or the answer.
- Request an appointment with a specific tutor for a live chat session
using the chat room feature of IVCTutor.
- IVCTutor also has a Student Bulletin Board that enables students to
ask questions and to share ideas with other students.
- IVCTutor provides helpful links to the Internet in a variety of areas
including Study Skills, Grammar, and Math.
Tutors can:
- See a list of tutors available by subject area. A more detailed description
of each tutor is also provided for the students to view.
- Access the chat room and the student bulletin board and post items
such as commonly asked questions and answers for students’ use.
- See which other tutors are online at any given time.
Program Administrators can:
- Allow people to apply for online tutor status.
- Log tutor time and activity online.
- Log student usage by student characteristics, institution, time of
day, duration, subject area, and questions asked
- Produce a variety of management reports.
Why IVCTutor?
While the most economical way to provide a comprehensive online tutoring
program to all students in Illinois would be to fund the program directly
with state funds, this option is not available at this time. As a result,
the most cost effective way of providing quality online tutoring is through
a partnership or consortium with other colleges. Listed below are some of
the reasons an institution would want to benefit from IVCTutor:
- Providing online tutoring by each college is not cost effective because
of the high cost of a comprehensive tutoring program and the low utilization
at any one college.
- Private online tutoring services are available for individual students
as well as for colleges; however, these are also very expensive.
- A consortium of 20 colleges can reduce the $50,000 cost of a comprehensive
online tutoring program to $2,500 for each college.
- Allowing the colleges to provide tutors for the online program can
save colleges a user subscription cost because existing tutors can be
used for this function.
Who can use IVCTutor?
- Spring Semester 2003. During the Spring Semester
all colleges can participate in IVCTutor free of any charges. However,
we encourage colleges to donate tutors’ time for IVCTutor. This
is designed to be a free pilot of IVCTutor. Colleges may experiment with
providing tutors for the system to see how this works for them.
- Academic Year 2003-2004. Starting with the Fall 2003
term, colleges will either provide a set amount of tutoring time per
semester or pay a subscription fee to participate in IVCTutor.
- The Future. Because of the cost of providing tutors
for IVCTutor, this online tutoring program can not continue without the
participation of colleges and universities that will either provide tutors
or pay a user fee so that the IVC can hire the necessary tutors.
Conclusion
IVCTutor has the potential of serving as a new and effective model for higher
education tutoring services. It provides many resources needed by the ever
changing higher education community. For more information about IVCTutor contact
Ivan Lach, Associate Director, Illinois Virtual Campus at ivanlach@uillinois.edu or
by phone at (217) 206-7834 Promotional materials and fact sheets about the
IVCTutor program are also available. For these materials, please contact Teri
Karpman at tkarpman@uillinois.edu or by phone at (217) 265-5602.
Thanks to Virgil Varvel for formatting and editing.
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