An adapted excerpt from Google Course Builder

 

 

Tutors

Whenever you teach a course, you need to decide if you want tutors to help you work with your students. The primary goal of tutors is to help students feel well-supported by humans throughout the course. This is also true for online courses. The feeling of support your students get from the availability of real, knowledgeable humans to answer their questions can greatly improve their motivation and, ultimately, the success of your course.

Tutors can help you carry out course administrative tasks, communicate with students and encourage their participation, and help them whenever they get stuck on technology or course-related questions.

Will you need tutors? Consider the number of students you anticipate for your course. If you have fewer than 50, you may be able to handle being both instructor and tutor yourself, if you have the time. Otherwise, the number of student places available in a for-credit course is determined by the numbr of tutors and the relevant staff-student ratio. In other words, the size of your team of tutors will depend on the number of students. In case you decide to have a pool of tutors, this page provides tips on how to work with and support them.

Probably the most important tip is to take care of the well-being of the tutor team. If you make them feel comfortable and supported, they will make your students feel comfortable and supported.

Tutor roles and responsibilities

How much you want your tutors to do can vary. The primary responsibilities are typically:

• Moderate the forum. Provide encouragement, answer questions, and delete spam.
• Moderate comments on Google+ page posts.
• Escalate questions to more qualified folk as needed.
• Collect commonly-asked questions into an FAQ document.

Additionally, consider using your tutors to pilot and to test the course content before it goes live. This is not a common tutor duty for live courses, but can be quite effective for an online course.

1. Before the course
1. Learn what the tutors need to do
2. Play a role in testing and development (if applicable)
3. Prepare to communicate with the public
• What tone should they take in posts?
• Are there things to stress or to omit?
• Are there legal issues they should be aware of ?
4. Prepare to moderate the forum
• If an official message has been sent to students, don't contradict it or add your own messaging
• Are there messages that should not be responded to? How will they know?
• What indicates that a message should be removed from the forum?
• How do you mark a post as a duplicate?
2. During the course
1. Ensure round-the-clock student support (or whatever coverage you decide is appropriate)
2. Moderate the forum by following communication protocols agreed upon by all tutors
3. Add further responses and anticipated questions to the tutor answer guide
3. After the course
1. Debrief as a group
2. When do you plan to stop communicating with your students and stop providing support? That is, when will you turn off the course forums?
3. Document how you did what you did
4. Prepare useful tools to help the next round of tutors
5. Add documentation about what students saw that needs fixing or can be improved for the next time around

Team and support staff: Roles and responsibilities

1. Who is involved in this project?
2. What are their roles?
3. How do tutors contact them for answering questions?
4. Hot topics: What are students asking about?
5. Happy topics:
1. What great things are students accomplishing in the course?
2. What positive comments have been received?
3. Tutor success stories
4. News or publicity mentions

Staffing and coverage

1. Consider being a tutor for your own course. Being available to answer students questions both gives you first-hand knowledge of those questions and provides extra support to your other tutors.
2. Consider your tutor's shedules:
1. An online for-credit course is live 24 hours of the day, 7 days a week for the entire length of the course. Unless the course scales to massive size, with a commendurate number of international tutors, you will specify only a limited set of office hours for tutors to be available.
2. Create a calendar of tutor dates in advance, including the expected commitment in terms of total number of hours, during what hours you most want coverage, and when events (release of units or assessments, hangouts, ...) will happen.
3. Where will you get your tutors from? If your course is international or multi-cultural, consider having tutors that the represent multiple groups. At the very least, consider having tutors in multiple time zones.
4. Think of the backup staff you will need, in case of sickness or whatever emergency comes up.
5. Consider the breakdown in expertise of your tutors. We expect all tutors to have mastered the academic content, although they should compare opinions so they can present a coherent image to students. They should also have a similar grasp of frontline student administrative questions and basic computer technical skills. Google found that their course on Power Searching that the most student questions concerned course administration, rather than course content. Advanced technical computer questions are another issue and might require a separate kind of help desk.
6. For a large audience that requires significant tutor support, consider having someone dedicated to taking care of all things related to tutor setup. In that case, pass them a checklist of to-do’s as a starting point, covering the things described here.

Backup help

Tutors probably won't be able to handle all questions that they receive during "Office hours" forums, and need to be able to refer issues to appropriate people.

The first line of action is simply to ask other tutors whith whom they work.

If this is insufficient, the easiest way for tutors in large courses to do referrals is with multiple email aliases:
    expert-help@ for tutors to escalate student content-related questions. Only available to course staff.
    tech-help@ for tutors to escalate student technical issues (such as login problems and other troubleshooting). Only available to course staff.

However, tutors remain the interface with users, relaying the solutions and closing out requests in a friendly, helpful manner. We don't make these email addresses available to students so that students are forced to do all their first-line communication with tutors.

Tutor training

Your tutors need to be familiar with both the content of the course and how to be a tutor for an online course. Depending on their level of experience, you may choose to provide training for them in either or both of those areas. Some tips:

• Have tutors go through the entire course before it opens to students, preferably with the final version that the students see.
• If you use tutors to pilot early drafts of the course, still make the final material available to them before it is available to students.
• Before the course starts, require tutors to attend a hands-on demo of moderating the forum. What should they do when they encounter a question they don't know how to answer? When a question has been asked many times? When a question is abusive or otherwise spam? And so on.
• If your course content works differently for different parts of your audience, make sure your tutors are aware of that fact, so that they don't misrepresent the material. For example, some aspects of Google Search functionality are available in only some countries. If your tutors think their personal experience is the only one, they may confuse students with inaccurate explanations.

Tutor community

Just like your course will be more successful if the students form a support community among themselves, it will be more successful if the tutors can also form a community. The following tips help create that feeling of community:

1. If you have multiple tutors on duty at the same time:
• Encourage them to be in close communication with each other. Questions come in waves; it's common for there to be a frequently-asked question at a particular time. Sharing information about problems and solutions eases the tutor work.
• If most of your tutors are physically near each other, get a single room for them to meet in during their tutor shifts.
• If your tutors are physically distributed, have all tutors on duty at the same time enter the same group chat.
• Don't force your tutors to participate in these group sessions, but do encourage them to attend at least one, to get a feel for what goes on during a shift.
2. Schedule tutors with overlapping shifts or encourage them to pass on highlights of what happened in the last shift to the new shift.
3. Create a buddy system for your tutors, so the more experienced can help the less experienced. Here, "experience" can be either experience at being a tutor or experience in the subject matter. In particular, new tutors tend to be less confident and may need help to getting started, and often want to check with another tutor before escalating questions to more expert advice.
4. Consider sending out “Daily Highlights” or starting a blog to keep tutors informed about the latest course happenings, and call out success stories regularly to keep everyone motivated.

Tutor documentation

The more documentation you provide your tutors, the more self-sufficient they can be. Centralize all of the documentation in one webiste that can be searched. Make the information editable by the tutors themselves, so that they can add information as the course progresses.

Topics to include:

1. Information about the University. (Most of this is available in the catalog and website.)
2. Policy updates.
3. Information about the course itself:
1. Audience
2. Objectives
3. Logistical details (How many units? When will they be released? How long is each? ...)
4. Link to the course so the tutors can go through the material themselves
4. Announcements to students
1. Official messaging to students on various decisions, such as the mid-course assessment due date.
2. Answers to commonly-asked questions (and add to these answers while the course is ongoing).

Close communication

In addition to the formal documentation or training you do for your tutors, strive for close communication with them both before and during the course.

1. Set up an internal email alias for the tutor team.
2. Throughout the course, keep tutors informed on course developments, breaking news, shifts in strategies, and so on. In essence, make sure they feel part of the team delivering the course. Keep emails to tutors concise and don’t send too many small details or too much to read. You want them to feel included, not overwhelmed.
3. As described in tutor community, put out a daily summary for tutors on any updates and changes. Include information such as the most popular questions asked by students that day and what their responses should be. Also include ongoing data, such as the number of registrants and their progress. The first type of information helps them assist better; the second type improves their motivation.
4. Be open to your tutors’ insights on how to improve the course. As the active interface between the course and your students, tutors have firsthand experience with the students and can often provide you with important feedback.
5. At the end of the course, conduct a debrief with your tutors to gather information you can use to improve the experience next time.