Online Tutoring?

Daanji asks: "Being a struggling Electrical Engineering student at Northern Arizona University I have taken on a Math tutor job to support myself at the Learning Assistance Center. Being one of the few computer literate tutors on staff, I have been asked if I wanted to participate in online tutoring. This trial will begin with moderate means, consisting of Microsoft Netmeeting (which almost everyone has on their machines), a digital pen, and hopefully Mathematica, Maple, or some other math program. I've also been asked to think about how to fully implement this idea to its full potential to provide students with an acceptable service. What I would like to know is if anyone has been involved in a similar situation. What technologies have any of you used (software or hardware) to implement a similar system: what works best, what doesn't, how effective was it, and how much did it cost? Was your experience successful or worth the effort? Any suggestions or constructive criticisms, helpful hints, or links would be appreciated."

Comments

Re:Ubiquitous net meeting?

[eht]

at a guess, the vast majority of people using a personal computer made in the last five years have a version of windows operating system installed, pretty much anything 98 or above have netmeeting already installed, i think the easily accounts for his definition of most

NetMeeting doesn't work through NAT or firewalls

[Lumpish Scholar]

NetMeeting is a software implementation of an H.323 (voice over IP, "VoIP") endpoint. That protocol opens UDP ports dynamically (e.g., part of the session says, "okay, the next part of this session will happen on my port 1923"). Firewalls hate that. NAT routers do even worse, since the IP address and port of the new connection get translated (i.e, munged).

Why would this be a problem? What if the dorm rooms are behind a firewall? What if the whole university is behind a firewall, and someone (a commuter, not a resident student) wants to connect from home? What if university doesn't have a firewall, but the commuting student does at home (cable modem + Linksys)? NetMeeting won't work in those situations. There are descriptions of how to make it work, but they're complicated enough to be useless to almost everyone. The Windows XP VoIP platform is based on SIP, which has similar problems.

The only solutions are: use a firewall and/or NAT router that understands your VoIP protocol (I only know one that handles H.323, and I know of work on SIP for this but haven't heard of any solutions), avoid firewalls, or avoid VoIP.

Source: Four and a half years developing a major commercial H.323 gatekeeper (call control software), which interoperated with terminals (including NetMeeting) and gateways.

I use Glance

[kf2pc]

I have found this really nice software from Glance Networks. www.glance.net Someone views (in your case a teacher) and then you have everyone else just point to a web url like foo.glance.net and your done! Your desktop is viewed in real-time to all! (Password protected of course :) Hope this helps. L.

Email

[MrResistor]

Seriously.

Since I quit tutoring when my daughter was born I've had several students come back to me for help, and the vast majority of that has been through email. It works just fine, and yes I do mean for math.

One of the problems with using Netmeeting boils down to the question of why these students can't make it to regular tutoring sessions? If it's because of time constraints, then this solution isn't going to help them much either. If it's a distance issue, like if your school has satalite campuses a significant distance away, then the school needs to put forth the effort to find tutors who live in that area and give them a space to work in, or they need to pay an existing tutor for their travel time to serve that campus. In short, every possible effort should be made to facilitate face-to-face contact between student and tutor. If it's an issue of students who just have occasional questions and don't need a regular tutor session, my school has a Math Lab which serves this purpose wonderfully. It's a room with several tables, tons of whiteboard space, and at least one tutor on duty at all times (7am-8pm, IIRC). At peak times we had 2 tutors on duty, although it was a great hangout place for the people who worked there so there were usually 3 or 4 tutors available if things got crazy. If one student was taking up too much time, we would suggest that they go next door to the tutor center and make a regular tutoring appointment. This was also a convenient place for study groups to meet. At satalite campuses we had a few open hours a week where a tutor would be available, but that really didn't work as well as the lab.

I have already stated that tutoring over email worked fine for me, but the devil is in the details. All of these students were people that I had an existing relationship with; some of them I had tutored face-to-face for 3 or 4 semesters and some are friends I have known for 10 years or more. In short, we know each other. I have a good sense of their learning style and the kinds of metaphors and such that will work for them, and they in turn have a good sense of my communication style, and likely already had or were familiar with my reference materials (the prof who ran the math lab made up some really great cheat sheets for algebra, geometry, trig, and calc that I always kept copies of for my students). When it comes down to it, face-to-face is always better.

Anyway, what I would suggest for your situation is usenet. Set up a newsgroup for your schools math department. If you have something like a math lab, set up a machine for the tutors to use to answer newsgroup questions, hopefully with some sort of automatic alert for new messages, and maybe also get some of the teachers to dedicate some time to answering questions there as well. A newsgroup could serve many of the situations I've listed above. If someone is assigned to check on it regularly it can be very responsive, while at the same time serving those who can't participate during normal hours. It also serves as a database of answers for someone who has a question which has already been answered, and threads are good for bringing together people who are having the same issues, sort of like a per-problem study group. It also makes it easy for others to answer questions, removing a great deal of the burden from the tutors, and provides a convenient forum for announcing events (math contests, math club meetings, etc) and organizing study groups.

Most importantly, though, it doesn't require a fast net connection. As nice as it may be to be able to use something like maple or mathematica over netmeeting, I think you'll be excluding a lot of people just through the connection requirements to make that work well.

Notice also that I said usenet and not http-based discussion group. While those are all well and good, and work well in some circumstances, they are slow over dialup and can be irritating to navigate. That sort of overhead is something you simply don't need.