1. Reflecting on your existing experience

What do you consider to be the most important aspects of the online tutor's role? Your expectations are likely to be shaped by your experiences so far as both a tutor and a student. As a starting point, you might find it useful to reflect on the experience you already have of teaching, either on campus or online, or both. If you have the opportunity, you might also find it useful to compare your own experiences with a colleague.

Consider the following statements, which represent three key aspects.

Subject expertise: I am responsible for providing my students with expert input. I am there to ensure that they can get to grips with the subject by taking advantage of my expertise.

Learning and Teaching approaches: I am responsible for ‘managing the learning environment’. I prepare teaching and learning activities and organise the time and space available to maximise learning

Emotional intelligence: I am responsible for the ‘atmosphere’ in the 'room'. I recognise that feelings are important both for me and my students, and I try to encourage emotional states that are conducive to learning.

Reflecting on your teaching and learning experiences so far, have all three elements been equally important? What has the balance been for you? Click below to see a short commentary.

Click here for our commentary

2. Your expectations of the online tutor role and what essential duties will be involved

There are many factors that you will need to consider as you develop your role as an online tutor and unit 2 of this resource aims to provide you with points of reflection on some of these. Your own experience of tutoring in both face-to-face and online contexts is likely to shape your approaches, along with the specific norms and expectations of tutoring on the specific modules and programmes you are working with.

As a further stimulus to reflection on your own expectations, consider what you expect the essential elements of the role to be. You might find it useful to make a list of verbs or of key duties. Once you have done this, you can compare your ideas with the lists below, drawn from the handbook for the MSc in International Humanitarian Affairs in the Department of Health Sciences.

Click here to show the example followed by a commentary

Key verbs extracted from the role description

Key tutoring verbs: Support, motivate, redirect, assist, motivate, enable, add, encourage, facilitate, provide, help, correct, manage

MSc in International Humanitarian Affairs handbook: The Role of the Module Tutor

Teaching online using asynchronous discussion forums - the role of the tutor is to:

Support students' capacity to learn;
Provide support appropriate to post-graduate level study - helping students to engage with issues, find and explore sources, and analyse and evaluate the material and draw conclusions;
Add value where appropriate by bringing in references to other material and/or personal (work) experience;
Help students to work in a collaborative way, in small 'tutorial groups', with the aim of sharing their experience and learning from different locations;
Enable students to make connections between the academic content of the programme and their professional experience;
Provide encouragement and reassurance to all individuals as well as the group as a whole; and
Encourage peer-support and socialisation between students in order to overcome isolation and to assist motivation.

The functions that tutors will perform in relation to individual modules are as follows:

To assist individual students with problems or issues related to the module. These could be to do with the module content (e.g. difficult concepts or matters that students find unclear) or with the learning approach (such as how to go about a group task, or how to access a particular resource);
To ask questions of the students and challenge their thinking in a positive and constructive way;
To redirect any queries from students that are best dealt with elsewhere (i.e. by the supervisor or the helpdesk); and
To facilitate the group discussions including clarifying what is expected, prompting groups and adding to their discussions, helping to synthesise the key points that have emerged, picking up on any direct/indirect questions that are left unanswered by the group etc.

Tutors are also asked to manage these discussions effectively. This means:

Encouraging and motivating student’s participation in discussions by responding in a timely and student-centred fashion (ie. replacing visual clues that indicate presence and listening with text-based comments, using posts to support and encourage as well as to direct thinking, etc);
Ensuring that all students are contributing (and prompting those who are not);
Keeping the discussion focussed on the question/topic, whilst encouraging exploration;
Being visibly present in the discussion;
Providing advice on general learning issues (for example guidance on the amount of reading that students need to undertake, or the requirements of assessed work or how to reference sources); and
Concluding the discussion.

Students will also have the opportunity to talk to their tutor once per module via Skype or other VoIP service and software.

You may have identified some key differences between your own list and the duties listed above. Important potential differences involve the level of student support expected and the use of synchronous teaching methods. In this case there are regular synchronous tutorials that you would be expected to engage with. The specifics of your own tutor role are likely to vary depending on the programme and module you are tutoring on, but the core element of the role is, of course, likely to be concerned with guiding students through the module, helping them to meet the module learning outcomes and to succeed in the module assessment.

3. Online tutoring vs. face-to-face

In the light of your reflections above and your consideration of the role description, consider the key similarities and differences between teaching in a face-to-face context and teaching online.

Are there aspects of face-to-face tutoring that you consider to be equally applicable online? What key differences do you think you may need to bear in mind? Consider these questions then compare your ideas to ours by clicking below.

Click here to show our commentary

Again, your answers might be influenced by the style of teaching that you’ve been involved with. Have you been a 'guide on the side', prioritising facilitation and collaborative learning supported by subject expertise (a good working conception of an online tutor), or more of a 'sage on the stage' - focusing on content delivery and the 'transfer' of subject expertise - which is less characteristic of online tutoring practice?

Here are our ideas for key similarities and differences between face-to-face and online tutoring (not intended to be a definitive list):

Similarities

Both are a fundamentally ‘human business’ meaning that:

the same ‘lesson plan’ may well lead to different outcomes depending on the mix of students taking part
your tutoring style online is likely to be influenced by your own personal style as well as the particular features of the discipline you teach

Many of the skills that make for successful tutoring online at a distance are the same ones that are required for tutoring in face-to-face settings e.g.
- the ability to motivate and generate interest in the subject matter
- awareness of learner needs and how to cater to them
Some day-to-day elements of practice may also be similar e.g.
- drawing on contributions made by your students and inserting your own knowledge and experience
- monitoring for opportunities to incorporate up-to-date or topical materials to provide examples and demonstrate the relevance of the concepts being studied
Effective tutoring in both mediums requires skill, dedication and time! Note that online tutoring is definitely not ‘quicker and easier’ - even when all content is asynchronous, effective tutoring (via methods covered in this resource) requires a significant amount of both skill and time

Differences

Despite the similarities listed above:

From a pedagogical perspective, a shift from ‘one-to-many’ transmissive approaches towards collaborative learning may involve shifts in practice such as

a shift towards facilitation, guidance and supervision of the learning process (including interventions to support and stretch learning as needed)
addressing students’ working methods and approach to collaborative activity online, again possibly needing to facilitate/intervene

There are also shifts at a practical level based on being physically distant from students, including

coping with both the affordance and limitations of communicating via written text - e.g. on the one hand you typically have more time to decide what to say (in terms of content and specifics of wording), but on the other you can’t rely on physical communication cues (tone of voice etc.) when either transmitting or receiving messages
using an appropriate level of formality in text-only communication
handling interactions with students who might be geographically distant and in different time zones (arguably, you will likely need to handle greater student diversity relative to factors such as learning culture and time out of education, along with learners who are more time-pressured)

To consolidate the idea of online tutoring requiring some different behaviours and skills to face-to-face, please refer to the following role aspects which are listed in the MSc in International Humanitarian Affairs tutor handbook (all relate to managing discussion boards):

Encouraging and motivating student participation in discussions by responding in a timely and student-centred fashion (ie. replacing visual clues that indicate presence and listening with text-based comments,
using posts to support and encourage as well as to direct thinking, etc);
Ensuring that all students are contributing (and prompting those who are not);
Keeping the discussion focussed on the question/topic, whilst encouraging exploration;
Being visibly present in the discussion.

What next?

It is likely that a large proportion of your interactions with students will take place asynchronously through the medium of text. In the next activity, you will be asked to consider some of the key advantages and disadvantages of this mode of communication for learning.