Brief report: new roles for tutors in an online classroom.

Brief report: new roles for tutors in an online classroom.
Journal of College Reading and Learning - September 22, 2002
Boria Sax

Word count: 2468.

citation details

This article discusses the use of online teaching assistants or "course wizards," employed at Mercy College not only to tutor students who are experiencing difficulty but also to facilitate discussion and to model the role of a successful student. It begins with a brief summary of the vocation of tutor as it has changed and developed from ancient times to the present. It continues with a discussion of the current crisis in higher education in America and of how online education brings new possibilities and challenges. Wizards not only help students who are at risk but also facilitate discussion and, most importantly, model the role of a successful student.

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The first tutors may have been highly educated slaves in Athens and other Greek cities during the Classical period, which would look after the young children of their masters and provide them with instruction. The word "pedagogue," meaning "educator," was originally a term for such slaves, who had virtually no power yet might retain a degree of prestige, an ambiguous status not entirely unlike that of educators today. "Tutor" was originally a Latin word, a rough synonym for "pedagogue," derived from "tueri," meaning "to take care of." Until at least the end of the Middle Ages, it generally meant "guardian" or "protector."

A distant connection with servitude has accompanied the vocation of educator since the ancient world, never entirely cancelled by the illustrious names that have been associated with it. The vocation continues to have a very ambivalent status, and it commands far more prestige than power. The ambiguity of the instructor's position, at once the master and the servant of his charges, creates psychological tensions. The skill of an instructor still lies largely in such skills as knowing how to maintain the proper psychological distance from those studying under him. There is a popular image of the tyrannical schoolmaster, plagued by profound insecurity, for example Washington Irvings' fictional Ichabod Crane. Whether or not such people were ever so common in life as in fiction, they highlight the ambiguity of a traditional educator's position.

For Socrates, and his contemporaries, the vocation of tutor was almost synonymous with that of educator. As Plato and others founded formal schools, the profession of educator started to become bureaucratized. Aristotle gave individual lessons to Alexander the Great. When he taught larger groups of pupils, however, Aristotle employed "archons" or student helpers, probably the ancestor of our "peer tutors." Later, Greek slaves or freedmen often tutored the children of noble families in Rome. The population of Rome eventually expanded to over a million people, and large numbers of citizens sought an education for their children. At the age of about seven, most freeborn children in Rome were sent to a primary school, where they learned to read, write, and count. These schools featured systematic use of "peer tutoring," where students divided into groups under the direction of an older colleague. Boys from the upper classes in Rome went on to advanced studies in schools of rhetoric, roughly the equivalent of our colleges today. Qunitillian, who authored Institutio Oratoria, often considered the first systematic treatise on pedagogy, in the latter first century ACE, used peer tutoring on a more advanced educational level.

With the end of the Roman Empire came a decline in literacy. What learning continued was primarily in monasteries and at a few courts such as that of Charlemagne at Aachen. The twelfth century saw the rise of great universities at such centers as Paris, Chartres, Bologna, and Oxford. The basic model of education at these universities was intellectual apprenticeship, in which pupils would be placed under the guidance of a single man of learning. Thousands of students, however, would come to hear illustrious teachers such as the monk Abelard in Paris. Since these students also required individual attention, peer tutors were sometimes employed.

But in a fairly continuous tradition since the ancient world, the role of a tutor to children of the aristocracy remained an option for those who were content to live relatively modestly and devote their lives to scholarship. Under the rule of primogeniture, this was, for example, an option for younger sons who lacked the temperament to be either a knight errant or a monk. Up through the modern period, it was still an option for those who were too independent for life in a university. It could also be a temporary job in times of crisis or transition. Those who worked as private tutors include some of the most illustrious names in Western thought, such as the philosopher Rene Descartes, the philosopher John Locke, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the poet Friederich Holderlin, the novelist E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the fabulist Hans Christian Andersen.

In the latter eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, there was a growing demand for universal education, but governments were reluctant to provide sufficient funds to hire the necessary teachers. The result was often that most teaching had to be done by peer tutors. This was institutionalized by such educators as Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell in Britain during the early nineteenth century and shortly afterwards in other countries of Europe and North America. It was phased out in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as public education became more demanding and more specialized. Only toward the end of the twentieth century has it had a modest revival. On a university level, the tradition of peer tutoring has evolved into the institution of Teaching Assistant, but such people do not provide individualized instruction. Instead, they simply perform essentially the same work as regular instructors for less pay. Academic institutions revolve around the students and faculty, and the role of tutors is usually marginal at best.

To summarize so far, the vocation of tutor has a longer, more complex, and sometimes more exalted history than many academics realize. Online learning now requires that we reconsider the structures of a traditional classroom, and the role of tutor may assume a new importance. I began directing tutoring at the Online Campus of Mercy College in fall of 1999. While there was a reasonably substantial literature about online education, much of it was too abstract to be easily used in practice. Much of it was too specific to a particular situation to be applied elsewhere. There was no standardized model for online tutoring that the college could simply adopt, so we would have to improvise.

Online education continues to be structured approximately like a traditional geographic classroom, with syllabi, exams, papers, and discussion. Nevertheless, the online classroom tends to be more collaborative than the traditional one. In a geographic classroom authority is constantly indicated by means such as the arrangement of chairs around the instructor. Conspicuous markers of authority are absent when people are online. In a chat room or bulletin board, professor, student, and tutor all appear simply as print on the screen. The partial anonymity enables people to speak more freely, and discussions often become very lively and intense. Shy students often find they can communicate more readily, and the classroom is unlikely to be dominated by a small number of individuals.

In general, the online teacher needs to manage more and lead less (or at least less obviously) than his or her traditional counterpart. Since materials such as classroom lectures must be written down, the workload of an online teacher is generally greater. On the other hand, the online teacher is relieved of many habitual burdens. The online teacher does not generally need to worry about how to fill the one to three consecutive hours allotted to the class. He/she does not have to be an entertainer, at least not so often. Perhaps even more significantly, he/she does not have to worry so much about keeping order in the classroom.

Traditionally, keeping order has been largely a matter of ensuring that students focus primarily on the teacher rather than on one another. Already in Roman times, Quintilian worried that "pupils at the commencement of their studies when progress is as yet but in the bud, are more disposed to imitate their schoolfellows than their masters ..." (Quintilian, 1963, vol. 1, p. 223). In online classrooms, however, the teacher should encourage students to relate to one another rather than just to him/her. The teacher who has switched from a traditional to an online classroom must not only change but sometimes even reverse habits and expectations. Conversations among students during class are no longer a distraction or sign of disrespect; they are part of the learning process.

As Palloff and Pratt (2001) have written in Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom:

   In order for a high degree of interactivity to occur in an online course,
   the roles of faculty and students need to change: faculty need to be
   willing to give up a degree of control and allow the learners to take the
   lead in learning activities. Although this sounds easy, both faculty and
   students bring previous educational experience and expectations to the
   online classroom. Students expect to be "taught" and faculty expect to
   "teach." Consequently, students need to be oriented to their new role and
   the ways in which learning occurs online (p. 153).

What complicates the process, however, is that there is not yet any universally accepted paradigm of how the online classroom ought to operate.

This raises the question of to what extent we are using a terminology, with its associated mental structures, in our discussion of the online classroom that are borrowed from traditional pedagogy but may no longer be entirely appropriate. I am reminded of one social theorist of the early twentieth century who said that every government required "a king," only later to explain that the monarch might be a "president" or "prime minister." The dualistic structure of students and teachers, while not exactly anachronistic, does not seem to adequately describe the dynamics of the online classroom.

Colleges across the country have for some time been experimenting with new divisions of labor that might be appropriate to an online campus. The person who writes the syllabus, for example, will not necessarily always be the same as the person who teaches the course. Moran and Myringer (1999) have written that for instructors of distance learning classes, "the role of information provider declines; that of mentor and collaborator in learning grows" (p. 62). While faculty have been trained primarily as information providers, tutors are just as likely to function as mentors and perhaps more likely to be collaborators. As the latter two roles increase in importance, the significance of the tutor may be expected to grow.

In spring of 2001 Mercy College began to offer tutoring online, as part of the services of an Online Campus with over 175 courses. The tutoring is provided in an online area called the Center for Writing and Academic Assistance. This contains a discussion area with topics corresponding, among other things, to various subjects and individual courses. A student who wishes assistance may place a note in the appropriate topic, which will then be answered by a tutor. The students may also contact tutors through their web pages, which are also posted in the Center for Writing and Academic Assistance. Many students who clearly needed assistance, however, remained inhibited about asking for it, just as they usually are at a geographic campus.

"Course wizards" were employed in 23 courses during fall 2001. In many respects wizards are like online teaching assistants, but they refrain from any activity related to grading, which could add an unwanted tension to their relationships with students. A wizard assists the professor in a course in many ways including tutoring students, facilitating discussion, and locating resources. Many course wizards also offer guidance to both students and faculty in the use of instructional software. They have the same access to the course taught by a professor as students. Each wizard is trusted to spend an average of ten hours per week on each course. Wizards are encouraged to help foster a sense of community in the Online Campus by actively taking part in discussions and activities. Most of them are successful students, and they can provide peers with the benefits of their experience. They can sometimes mediate between faculty and students, helping members of each group to appreciate the perspectives of the other.

In a survey of 16 faculty members that had used wizards in their classes, 93% said that the wizards had helped to facilitate class discussion. More than half, 53%, of the faculty members, said their wizards were "very helpful," the highest rating on a scale of one to four. Only 7% did not find the wizards helpful at all. In a survey of 109 students, we compared the responses of those who had wizards in their classes and those that did not. We asked students whether they had ever sought tutoring or similar help with work in their course from somebody other than the instructor. In classes with wizards, an appreciably higher number, 29%, had sought assistance, compared to 11% in courses without wizards. We also asked, "Do you feel socially comfortable in this course?" In classes with wizards, 97% said they felt "quite comfortable" or "moderately comfortable" in the class, as compared with 85% in classes without them. Only 3% of those in classes with wizards felt tense or uncomfortable, compared with 15% in classes without them.

Another survey showed that the presence of wizards in a class cut the failure rate in half.

Of course, statistics can never tell the whole story. The wizards were asked to state briefly in their own words what they liked best about the courses they had handled. The theme that kept coming up was satisfaction with the opportunity to interact with others and contribute to the classroom. Tutors had become important participants in the process of education and, thereby, full members of the academic community.

References

Moran, L.& Myringer, B. (1999). Flexible learning and university change. In Harry, K. (Ed.), Higher education through open and distance learning (p. 57-71). New York: Routledge.

Palloff, R. M. & Pratt, K. (2001). Lessons from the cyberspace classroom: The realities of online teaching. San Francisco: Josse-Bass.

Quintilian. (1963). The Institution Oratoria of Quintilian (H. E. Butler, Trans.). Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard UP.

Boria Sax works as Director of Online Academic Affairs at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He is author of many books including, most recently, Animals in the Third Reich (Continuum, 2000) and the Mythical Zoo (ABC-CLIO, 2001).

Citation Details

Title: Brief report: new roles for tutors in an online classroom.
Author: Boria Sax
Publication: Journal of College Reading and Learning (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 2002
Publisher: College Reading and Learning Association
Volume: 33 Issue: 1 Page: 62(6)