/ only connect - progress - STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT \

While the dissertation will attempt to view the Only Connect project in something of an academic vacuum, the project itself exists very much in the real world. This section will look at some of the issues that arise from the practical experiences that the project has thrown up that affect, or are affected by the management of home tuition as it exits in the UK, Derbyshire and the project specifically.

/ Other Agencies - Children In Care \

At the outset of the project it was decided that we should include a student who was in the care of social services. Many such children and teenagers have been provided with very high-specification computers as part of a local initiative which seemed an obvious advantage. There were also issues surrounding the inclusion of such children in special projects; it was felt that they often missed out.

Arrangements were made to include this student in mid April so that the machine could be ready for the start of the project. It turned out that the machine, while internet-capable, was not actually connected to a phone line. It took until early June to get through the various sets of permissions required for this to happen. By this time the other seven students had already started to form a coherent social group so it was seen as very important that this student was on-line as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, it then turned out that the level of security on the machine was very high. Indeed, the students were not even meant to have access to the Windows Desktop. In true teenage fashion, the student had found their way around this particular piece of security, but it was still very difficult to set up the AOL system. The machine would not allow new short-cuts to be added to the desktop or new items to be added to the Start menu, the virus protection software also made it very difficult to actually install anything. We ended up with the student having to bypass the opening desktop to W98, then access AOL directly from its folder on the C drive. Even once this was done it was discovered that the inclusion of CyberPatrol on the system blocked any access to the web via AOL, so the student was left simply with email. It was impossible to alter the CyberPatrol settings as it needed to connect to the internet to register itself but would not do so via AOL.

At this stage of writing this student has managed to receive and send a few e-mails, but the many security features on the system seem to make this such an effort that, at the time of writing half way through the project, the student is effectively excluded from joining in with it. It has become clear that it will not be possible to get permission to remove any of the protective features, specifically CyberPatrol, before the project's end as it is by no means clear who can actually take such a decision. This was despite explaining that we were using AOL's built in parental controls to restrict web access. There is still some hope that we may be able to find a way of getting CyberPatrol registered at which point we might get more AOL features working, but this is taking a huge amount of time to probably little effect.

I will interview this student at the end of the project in an attempt to discover their own part in this, as it must be said that the AOL settings are being regularly interfered with stopping it being able even to dial out.
/ Staffing – some emerging thoughts \
Idea Looking at the patterns of home-tutor activity (see elsewhere), I have developed three models of integrating staffing issues with the idea of supporting home tuition with on-line technologies.

1) Extending tutor contact
In this model we see the most passive approach. Here the technology is used by a home tutor to broaden communication with an existing student or students. This might allow an increase in the contact between tutor and student, perhaps allowing work to be exchanged on more that the twice weekly basis that currently exists. It could also be used to monitor more closely the students time management as work can be exchange in smaller time units.

A further development of this might be that a tutor creates an informal on-line community and possibly collaborative working to some degree between their own student group.


2) Extending tutor access
Here we take the existing home tutors, but instead of linking them to their own students, they are linked to other students whom they do not know in the face to face situation. They might simply deliver tasks via e-mail or they could set up more complex group and even collaborative projects – potentially creating an on-line community. The advantage over 1 is that this gives students, especially those over primary (elementary) school age, access to a wider range of tutor/subject expertise; though there are obviously other (possibly better) ways of achieving this without using CMC.

3) Centralised CMC based home tuition support
In this model we develop a different kind of home-tutor, that is someone who works only on-line, quite possibly from within a school during set times on education authority equipment. This tutor would concentrate entirely on developing CMC based materials and activities, delivering them, assessing them and managing part of the learning of a potentially large number of students.

Let's un-pack these. First, let's say that these are in no way mutually exclusive, it should be possible to have tutors creating an on-line group with their own students, creating additional groups with other students, while the students also get work from a central tutor. However, it seems likely that such an arrangement would be an organisational nightmare.

The advantages of model 1 are that it is based on a tutor expanding the quantity and quantity of work they are already doing with a group of students whom they know. They will also be in the best position to decide how those students might be sub-grouped and how they can make fuller use of the communications channels offered by CMC and resources offered by the web.

Model 2, the one used in Only Connect, seems to be the least favoured option. It can be frustrating for tutors not to have such contact with their own F2F students, while they are being asked to deal with students they don't know. Certainly it's caused all sorts of problems with the tutors involved.

Both models 1 and 2 give rise to further problems. the most fundamental question they raise is that of payment for a workforce that works on an hourly rate. Many institutions are facing this problem as they begin to employ on-line tutors who work from home. One possible solution here is to have a resource centre that the tutors visit for a negotiated time each week and do all their on-line work from there. The point is that this is an issue for both tutors and the employer and it requires a solution that protects both. Tutors need to feel that they are paid for the work they do and the expenses they have to meet, they must feel secure in what is expected of them if they are to avoid some of the difficulties outlined in the Tutors section of this document.

Employers too need to feel that they are getting what they are paying for and need to be able to create predictable budgets for tutor time. The kind of open-ended use of time that models 1 and 2 could create is difficult for all concerned.

By a process of elimination, model 3 begins to look like a more sustainable way to approach things. It immediately removes the problems of expectation for both tutor and employer, but it has many other advantages.
  • Consistency - home tutors are a very fluid workforce and changes in F2F tutors is common. Model 3 provides a more consistent element to the student's educational experience. This is more likely as the on-line tutor could be employed on a standard full-time teachers' contract giving them security and more reason to stay in the job for longer, rather then seeing it as a transitional thing.
  • Skills development - such a tutor would be in a position to develop their skills in this new area and the employer's training budget could be focused more efficiently on a few people as opposed to models 1 and 2 where large parts of the tutor workforce would have to be trained, but probably to a lower level.
  • Focused resources - such a tutor based in a school would immediately have access to that schools materials resources. It would also mean that hardware and various software could be concentrated in one place and set to a higher level than could be expected in individual tutors' homes.
I can see that model 3 seems to be emerging here as a favoured option and I want to nip that straight ion the bud. I think what is really happening here is that I'm looking for some alternative to models 1 and 2 because of the problems they seems to raise as they were partially tested in the project. Readers should note that model 3 has had not testing at all and thus is easy to paint as a rosy picture. It's quite possible that many of the problems with 1 and 2 can be fixed, but my personal feeling is that 3 should at least be tested at some point.


Further Thoughts on Model 1:
There's perhaps more potential in this approach that I first thought. What if you programmed into the paid time a F2F tutor gets, say, 1 additional hour per pupil that was specifically designated on-line time. Use this arrangement with tutors who have, say, 4 students, the additional paid time could be used to add support in a way the was more structured from everyone's point of view. A 'proper' learning/social group could be formed amoungst those students, collaboration structured in and so on. The advantage of this is that a lot of the 'tele-presence' issues simply vanish; the tutor gets an additional opportunity to set and recieve work and the students get a notional additional session a week at half cost. This wants expanding on, and there are still huge training and equipment issues to be got around, but it's worth looking at.

MORE LATER...
/ Bean-counter issues \
questionThere's one potential problem that has emerged towards the end of the project which ties in with some of the stuff discussed in the models above. This is about the fact that home tutors are paid for 'contact' time with an element for 'preparation' time. In a system such as that emerging within Only Connect it's very difficult to use these ideas when applied to asynchronous communication - is replying to an e-mail 'contact'? Currently it seems not, and even if it was, this model of delivering learning involves a lot more in terms of designing tasks and marking work done.

Availability
One suggestion has been that tutors are physically on line for specified periods; i.e. they are potentially in contact and available to any student who wishes to talk to them. While line time is metered this is a problem, though it's likely soon to vanish. However, this kind of solution still lends itself more to model 3 than the others as that on-line state will be strictly confined to 'working' hours and does not require the tutor to be available from home with all the problems that raises.

Don't start from here
That is one, rather clunky, solution. More to the point is to change the definition of the home-tutor role and the way in which time is assessed. Again, someone employed on model 3 would be actually a full time teacher and could be employed on such a contract. If using the other models redefinition is vital, there must be some way of paying a tutor more generally for 'hours worked' rather than contact. What's really happening here is that the technology is changing the nature of the job faster that the administration can respond, but respond it must, and quickly if this kind of issue isn't to hold up developments.