TELE TUTORING

INTRODUCTION

            The important technologies in education that have combined to make the communication revolution and information age a challenging era for educators: Tele conferencing, Tele lecture, Tele tutorial, Tele seminar, etc.

TELE TUTORING

            Tele tutoring is a focussed instructional session involving demonstration and explanation by a tutor, practice by the participants and evaluation and corrective feedback by the teacher.

            A teletutorial may be initiated by an individual student or a small group, experiencing a particular learning difficulty by contacting the tutor at a distance with a request for help.

Tele-Tutoring Will Allow UVa. Teachers & Students to Keep in Touch -- Virtually

From Inside UVA June 9, 1995

Many students won't have to leave home to meet with instructors, tutors or discussion groups when Computer Science Professor Jorg Liebeherr's Grounds-wide Tele-Tutoring System (gwTTS) goes on line late this year Electronic Office Hours, the real-time tutoring sessions over an electronic network, is one of four programs Mr. Liebeherr will develop in the pilot phase of gwTTS , thanks to a teaching and technology fellowship.

For faculty and teaching assistants, what Mr. Liebeherr called "the notion of tele-presence" will mean more efficient use of instructional time and the ability to wield an array of educational tools including video tapes at a computer workstation to reach students throughout the area. It'll take just a phone call to link gwTTS to participants' desktop computers, which will then display live images of tutor and student plus a whiteboard that shows notations as they're made by either person. Except for the small-screen focus, it will be as if the discussion is face-to-face rather than by an electronic link between offices, homes and dormitories.

Other gwTTS programs being developed for potential

              Virtual classrooms: An instructor lecturing from a computer workstation to students at desktops in various locations will be able to use motion video, voice, data displays and graphical images as teaching tools. Students can ask questions and discuss points with the instructor, and the entire class can follow the exchange.

Digital video broadcasts of lectures: Talks given to students and others in a traditional classroom setting will be recorded on digital video tape, which can be transmitted at any time to any desktop computer equipped to receive gwTTS transmissions.

Remote study groups: Students will be able to use a network of desktop computers to discuss a project, using their gwTTS capabilities to work together on the whiteboard display and share voice, video and data materials.

Need special hardware and software: To transmit and receive the range of materials used in gwTTS programs, but Mr. Liebeherr expects to equip the average unit for a few hundred dollars. Equipment and systems already available at the University will be used to keep costs down, he explained. A prototype of gwTTS is scheduled to be completed this summer, and by the end of the year, Mr. Liebeherr and his team hope to have completed field tests and installation at selected points throughout the Grounds. Two professors in the Department of English, Jerome McGann and Michael Levenson, are interested in using gwTTS and will offer information and ideas to help in the design of the system, he noted.

Tele-education

Tele-education has a long history beginning with systems like that for teaching children in Australian Outback, the British Open University and other such organizations. These built on the idea of correspondence courses where course materials are sent periodically by post and augmented the experience with broadcasts either on radio or on TV. The problem of student isolation was addressed partially through techniques such as telephone access or two-way radio links with teachers. At the end of 1980s, the vest majority of distance education throughout the worlds was still primarily print-based.

Technologies used for distance education are evolving from primarily 'one-way' technologies and applications such as computer aided learning, computer based training and computer aided instruction, to more 'two-way' technologies and applications such as computer mediated communications and computer conferencing systems for education. The significance of 'two-way' technologies is that they allow foe interaction between participant and tutors, and perhaps even more significantly amongst participant themselves.

ADVANTAGES

You learn the basics of educational theory in vocational training and acquire detailed knowledge about your role as a tele tutor and required compentences.

You learn to guide your e-students proactively and to motivate them by taking effective counter-measures.

You learn to help your e-students handle the training content and to evaluate their

learning success.

You learn to become the constant companion of your e-students in order to reach their learning goal.

You learn to handle your students in a more flexible and professional way and to increase the productivity within the learning process.

You learn to encourage your students to achieve their personal best.

TARGET GROUPS

i.                    Instructors who want to implement or are already using e-learning systems

                        within their training facility.

ii.                  Trainers who want to provide efficient assistance and support for their

e - students.

iii.        Training managers who want to meet new training methods and update their existing knowledge.

TRAINING CONTENT

Ø  Changes and tendencies of today’s Training.

Ø  Fundamentals in methodology and didactics.

Ø  Basics and theory of e-learning and tele tutoring.

Ø  Virtual communication.

Ø  The changed role of learners and instructors.

Ø  Competence profile of a tele tutor.

Ø  Practical guide to support learning processes.

Ø  Assessment of learners performance.

Benefits for Language Instructors

The aim is to develop a tele-tutoring system for language teachers to enable them to download data from an internet database to aid in language teaching. Promotics II is the continuation of the Leonardo project Promotics I. The target group comprises language teachers. The aim is to promote language skills through the teaching of foreign languages. The project will provide an aid for language learners in the form of a CD-ROM. Promotics II targets trainers and language teachers. German, English, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian and Slovenian are the languages supported. The project will offer occupational terminology lists, on-line direct-learning software and chat for a for language teachers to exchange experiences, teaching methods and teaching skills. The aim is to improve language learning in Europe, to integrate inter-cultural competence in language learning and to network language learning centres. The long-term objective of Promotics II is to offer all schools with internet access a platform for language learning.

As part of the project, internationally recognised certification procedures are to be developed for on-line language learning. An on-line service centre will be set up for the core functions of Promotics II. This centre will be staffed by experts and will target multipliers throughout Europe in order to guarantee widespread dissemination of the project.

Evaluation tele tutoring support

CSCW research has already analyzed how specific CSCW environments affect different aspects of distributed work, e.g. task performance, social pressure, social presence, awareness, trust and group identity. For example, Kiesler emphasized the absence of social cues in text-based communication. Mark et al., reported the benefits from desktop sharing for distributed working groups. Sonnenwald found no statistically significance difference between task performance of distributed and collocated groups, when scientists had to work on an experiment task. But a remote experiment, where students are assisted by synchronous tele-tutorial support, is a distributed computer supported collaborative learning setting with certain characteristics

• Pedagogical concept: In most laboratories, students have to solve complex tasks in a situated context, so the pedagogical concept is problem based learning.

• Synchronous learning: Synchronous support is used, when the students work with the lab equipment. For the preparation and post processing of the laboratory session they can interact via asynchronous tools like E-mail.

• Asymmetric learning: The tutor has more knowledge than the students.

• Group size: The tutor supports only small groups of students during the execution of the lab.

• Duration: Students work only few hours on a typical remote experiment. How effective synchronous tele-tutorial support can be in such a specific CSCL setting, is one of our research interests.