1. A Multi-Institution, Online Tutoring Program:
Collaboratively Delivering Excellence in Student Services

2. Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium
We are a State of CT agency created in 1998 by the CT State Leg to provide support to the State’s colleges, and other schools, agencies, and businesses as they explored the most effective means of facilitating learning in an online environment. Starting with our Executive Director, Ed Klonoski and our Dean of Planning, Research and Assessment, Diane Goldsmith, , our staff has grown to include:
Educators
Program Managers
Instructional Designers
IT Development Team
And several support staff
All working together with our membership to improve their online courses, training programs and online student support services.
State Agency Created in 1998

3. Presenters Carolyn Rogers Director, Academic Partnership Programs
The CT Distance Learning Consortium
Greg Fallon Associate Dean for Learning Resources, Academic Services Passaic County Community College
Alan Mitnick Assistant Professor, English Department Passaic County Community College

4. AGENDA Intro to CTDLC’s eTutoring Program Why Choose to Collaborate?
The eTutoring Program Model
Consortia and Institutions
The eTutoring Platform
Synchronous and Asynchronous Tools
From an Institution’s Perspective
From a Faculty Perspective
Wrap Up- Your Questions and Comments

5. About Us CTDLC’s eTutoring Program Started in Fall 2001
Funded by a Grant from the Davis Education Foundation
Research as part of our participating in DOE FA Demonstration Project – lack of attention to student services by those putting classes online.
In Spring 2000 received a Davis Education Grant to create a collaborative solution to online student services and outcomes assessment.
Program is continuing, all institutions are paying.

6. eTutoring.org A Collaborative, Aggregated Service:
Institutions join for a fee, based on usage
Tutors provided by each institution
Tutoring hours are combined into one schedule
Students at each institution access all tutors on this one schedule
Our schools wanted to use our own tutors
Collaborative, aggregated service
Participating schools pool their resources
Each school provides a set number of tutoring hours to the overall tutoring schedule for the consortium
Students from all participating schools can access the entire schedule of tutoring.
Our 31 participating schools group their tutors into one shared schedule which all of their students then have access to.

7. eTutoring Services Online Tutoring Services Offered:
Synchronous Student-Tutor Sessions
Drop in Sessions Scheduled 7 days a week
Asynchronous Student Questions
Response received in 24 to 48 hours
Asynchronous Online Writing Lab
Live sessions are scheduled during hours students have indicated they most want help:
Evenings and weekends, especially Sunday nights
Also provide some morning and afternoon hours for students who want these hours, like stay at home parents, night shift workers,
Asynchronous Questions…Leave question at their convenience and pick it up when they can. Requires some training and practice on tutor’s part to provide meaningful, useful, in-depth responses that help students understand concepts…take their work to the next level on their own…careful not to answer questions for students.
Online Writing lab…by far the most utilized service in our program…provide responses to writing in all subject areas and at all levels…ESL, Developmental, through 400 level course.

8. Subjects Covered Writing across the curriculum Math Statistics Biology
Chemistry
Anatomy & Physiology
Accounting
Research Methods & Information Literacy

9. The Collaborative Effort
Why Build Collaborations?
Cost Savings
Shared Resources
Political Considerations
Build it TOGETHER, Own it TOGETHER
Flexibility in Design
The Strength and Size of the group makes more things possible
Members provide their students a service they could not afford alone
Institutions pay CTDLC a fraction of what other options would cost
Utilize existing human resources to meet their staffing obligation
Shared Resources
Institutions learn from each others’ sameness and difference
Access to a deep, wide pool of talent to influence decision-making
No one school has to come up with answers on its own
Address concerns by involving those concerned in Problem Solving
OWL Development Committee
Chair of English Department
Director of Learning Resource Center
Director of Writing Center
Political Considerations:
In sourcing Vs Outsourcing
A Particular Concern of Public Institutions
Build it TOGETHER, Own it TOGETHER
Collaboration builds Community
Ownership grows:
out of influence and investment of time and energy
out of an investment in the program’s success
The Strength and Size of the group makes more things possible!

10. Why Collaborate
“eTutoring represents the enormous value gained from collaboration. The network of talent made available through the pooling of resources of the participating two and four-year schools is hugely superior to whatever any individual institution may possess. Moreover, the ongoing sharing of ideas and resources contributes to even greater benefits. What you have done is create a forum for the sharing of new ideas in teaching and learning and, remarkably, a platform for the realization and testing of these ideas.”
Greg Fallon, Assistant Dean for Learning Resources,
Passaic County Community College

11. CTDLC COLLABORATIVE TUTORING MODEL
Director
Facilitates
Monitors
Schedules
Trains
Create Platform
Technical Support
Host
INSTITUTIONS
Market
Hire
Pay
Coordinators
Meet Regularly
Set Policy Collectively
Choose Subjects
Supervise Tutors

12. The Development Process
All Stakeholders Inform the Process:
Tutors Identify What Works,
What Doesn’t, What’s Missing?
Students let us know if our processes and systems are easy to use
Coordinators Identify Tools they need: Reports, Student Registration, Tutor Supervision

13. Tutoring Hours per Institution
Institutions Provide all Tutors to support one shared schedule
Provide a minimum of 5 Tutoring Hours a Week to support 150 tutoring sessions a semester
Institutions increase tutoring hours in 5 hour increments for every 150 sessions students utilized in a semester
All of our institutions provide a number of tutoring hours to a shared schedule that is accessible to all of the students at all of the institutions.
How do we go about staffing the program given the varying sizes of our schools and varying levels of student usage at each school? Keep in mind that some of our schools have less than 1000 full time equivalent students, while others have well over The number of student online tutoring sessions at an institution per semester can range between 100 to over 1000!
So how to we make the process fair?

14. Tutoring Hours per Institution
What Does that Mean?!!
# Student Sessions
Tutoring Hours Per Wk
0-150 5 10 15 20
An institution that has anywhere between 151 and 300 tutoring sessions will provide a minimum of 10 hours of a tutor’s time a week. If a school’s usage increases or decreases within an academic year, we adjust the number of hours provided accordingly.
We created this formula and so far it has worked fairly well for us…we make some adjustments in the scheduling to allow for fluctuations across the semester…you can imagine that student’s are visiting much more around midterms and in the last few weeks of the semester. Some of our tutors have flexible hours that we save just for those weeks…while others continue to work a fixed schedule throughout the semester.

15. Transparency= Accountability
Reporting Functions
Review Tutor Responses to Students for Supervisory Purposes
View how and when individual students access online tutoring services
Pull Date-driven reports to view numbers and types of online tutoring sessions

16. Gain and Build Faculty Trust
We Assure Faculty that:
We do not correct, edit, or redo students’ work
Tutors do not provide answers without a student’s active participation in the process
Program’s transparency supports these claims

17. Emphasis on Quality
Training: On going technical and pedagogical training of eTutors
eTutoring Standards of Practice
Extensive Resources for tutors
Administrative Tools for the institution
QA Monitor for OWL
Initial training when they start…ongoing training, eTutor workshop in the fall, metacognitive self review activity in the spring
At present a few coordinators are working with me to ramp up our guidelines for working with ESL students…we will eventually develop tutor training to support these new guidelines and standards. Institutions have access to standards and training materials to use in as they wish in their on campus tutoring programs
We’ve invested in developing writing resources, technical resources, and have utilized eTutors own work- posting the tutorials they have developed in their responses to students…they are supporting each others’ work
Admin tools- Student Usage Reports, Activity summary gives just the numbers, Student and Tutor searches to view interaction/sessions completed (quality review), Manage Student accounts- deactivate, etc. Adding Batch Upload registration Fall 06

18. Ongoing Program Evaluation
Conduct Student Satisfaction Surveys
Utilize Online Archives to Track and Report Student Usage
Utilize Archives to Monitor Quality
Establish QA Monitoring/Hire Consultants
View Program Development and Improvement as Ongoing
Conducting program assessments- measuring student satisfaction with surveys, survey tutors,
Utilizing online archives of tutoring sessions to track student usage by institution and by subject and to track program growth.
Utilizing online archives of tutoring sessions to monitor the quality of service. Learning Center Directors are given access to archives which they use to evaluate tutor performance.
Program Development is ongoing- We continually seek to improve services through the identification of best practices.

19. eTutoring Spring 2009 Northeast Consortium – CTDLC Administrator
eTutoring Spring 2009 Northeast Consortium – CTDLC Administrator 39 Institutions in 6 States
Connecticut:
12 Community Colleges
3 Ct State Universities
Charter Oak State College
U Connecticut
3 Private Institutions – U.B., Goodwin
Community College of Vermont
Illinois: Shawnee CC
Massachusetts:
8 Community Colleges
2 State Colleges
1 Private Institution
New York: CUNY Online, LaGuardia CC, Hostos CC
New Jersey: Passaic Community College
Fairleigh Dickinson University
Snapshot of our program…6 states, you can see we support institutions small and large, public and private urban, suburban and rural campuses…our collaborative community is quite diverse! 19

20. Platform Supports Multiple Hosting Options
CTDLC eTutoring Platform
Northwest
Consortium
Northeast Consortium
University Of
Toledo
This new platform allows for us to market the platform independently of our consortium. So one college is using the platform, but not as a part of the consortium. It also allows for other consortia to use the platform, and we are working with several institutions that we hope will move to running their own consortia. 20

21. Northwest eTutoring Consortium Administered by WSU and WAOL
eTutoring Spring 2009 Northwest Consortium – WSU DDP Administrator 19 Institutions in 2 States
Northwest eTutoring Consortium
Administered by WSU and WAOL
Washington State University
Main Campus and 4 branches
16 Washington Community Colleges
1 Oregon Community College 21

22. eTutoring Fall 2008 Hosting Tutoring via CTDLC’s eTutoring Platform
University of Toledo 22

23. Online eTutoring Platform
The Tutoring Platform
After 3 years of outsourcing, at end of grant phase of project, we decided to build our own tutoring platform:
Cost savings over time
Direct control over program content and design
Easier to respond to change
Version 2.0 of the eTutoring Platform
New State-of-the Art Synchronous Communication Tools
Institutional Batch Upload Registration
Improved Reporting Capabilities
Coming Soon:
Single Sign On Integration with BlackBoard and WebCT/Vista

24. The Breeze Virtual Conference Space- the live eChat meeting space for private drop-in sessions between students and tutors.

25. eTutoring at PCCC
Joined CTDLC, Fall 2006 (platform set up; tutor training; welcome page; promotion of service)
Began offering eTutoring services, Spring (7,000 students uploaded; 240 active student accounts; 663 essays submitted)
Embraced enthusiastically by ESL department (after 1st semester pilot, integrated eTutoring into all writing labs)

26. eTutoring at PCCC Huge increase in usage in Fall 2007
number of active student accounts nearly doubles to 464
number of essays submitted increases by 55% to 1,030)
Reaction from faculty to eTutoring
Increase in PCCC’s weekly tutor hours
More growth in Spring 2008 (545 active accounts; 1,667 essays submitted; up 61%)

27. eTutoring at PCCC Plateau in student usage
LibGuide:
Classroom orientations
Formal integration into WI courses

28. eTutoring in EN 205IW In Class Procedure for eTutoring:
Other than journal entries and exams, students submit each writing assignment to eTutoring at least once.
They are encouraged, though, and required in some cases to submit a work the three times that eTutoring allows.
After receiving the eTutor’s feedback, I look over the comments, make my own and return the paper to the student for revising.

29. eTutoring in EN 205IW
Having a professional tutor first engage my students’ paper is refreshing and more importantly, immensely helpful:
Often, the tutor’s comments “validate” ones I have already made to sometimes disbelieving students,
add insights I may not have considered nor seen
and generally help to create the feel of a “learning community.”

30. eTutoring in EN 205IW From a Student’s Perspective:
Sample eTutoring comments:

31. To Learn More about eTutoring
Contact:
Carolyn Rogers
Director, Academic Partnership Programs
The Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium

32. Q&A

33. Program Cost Institution Pays Annual Fee based on Student Usage
Currently paying between $2,500 and $6,000 for Platform, Management, Training
Institution Hires Tutor(s) and pays their institutional rate

34. Scalable Pricing Model
Usage Level
Annual Cost (Academic Year)
1st Year Introductory Fees
$2,250
150 sessions or fewer
$2,500
300 sessions or fewer
$3,000
450 sessions or fewer
$3,500
600 sessions or fewer
$4,000
750 sessions or fewer
$4,500
900 sessions or fewer
$5,000
For each additional 150 sessions
+ $250
One Time Set-up Fee:
account set-up, training of initial tutors
and coordinators; branding