The project started off with two home tutors involved. They were asked to give a commitment equivalent to three hours home tuition per week of the project for which remuneration was organised. The three hours was assumed to represent about 3.5 to 4 hours actual working time as home tutors have a preparation time element included in the pay structure.

There is no doubt that from well before the project the tutor's time commitment sky-rocketed. With all the planing and general chat there was huge volume of traffic on the Only Connect mailing list; literally hundreds of e-mails and hours of phone-calls were logged.

So, what was this all about? How was it that two people asked to make such a small commitment managed to work up such a storm of correspondence and discussion? What could all that discussion have been about and what did it achieve?

I need to be careful here as this is a discussion as much about individuals as systems, but from an ethical point of view I must generalise about the lessons I draw and conclusions I suggest. A place to start is to look at the 'comfort zones' the project threatened to drag these two out of.

Independence/Isolation
In Derbyshire at least, home tutors work independently. They are assigned students whom they provide two two hour tuition sessions per week during term time and they may work anything from 4 to 32 hours a week. They have little access to resources beyond what the students' last school may or may not provide; they have no resource centre, there is no physical focus where they might meet and they often have to approach a student with little or no knowledge of that students social, psychological or educational background. On top of that, if they arrive at a student's home and find they're not there, the tutor is not paid.

To work under these kinds of conditions I would generally expect the tutors to develop a lot of coping skills – most likely individual, personal coping skills which are likely to develop specific and individualistic approaches to the problems faced. Thus, the idea of working collaboratively, of having the work done, no matter how high in quality it may be, opened up to the view of another tutor or tutors could be potentially traumatic.

Several tutors I have spoken to actually see this as a valuable freedom through which to make the best of their teaching skills – but there seems to be a be a through-running feeling if independence/isolation which, whether seen as positive or negative by the tutor, suggests that opening up their work to the view of others would be an unwelcome experience.

And yet, this is exactly what the Only Connect project was asking of the tutors; to produce educational materials and approaches that would be on view to the other tutor, myself and Liz McQueen, DCC's home tuition officer.

Working with groups
As has been said, home tutors are by definition teachers of individual students. Ideas of creating core materials and differentiated versions are not something they don't know about or understand, but they are ways of working that do not form the general run of the home tutor's day. Only Connect asked the to work in a different way from their individual approach, to create materials for a distant group of students about whom they knew little or maybe nothing.

Assessment
Even if the project had looked at the idea of using on-line learning on a one to one basis it is a very difficult medium for getting to know a student. Trying to gauge the type and level of work required in a group ranging from years 8 – 10 would be challenging enough for a classroom based teacher who could see the students in front of her.

Collaborating
Again, tutors are used to creating specific programmes for specific students based on whatever skills the tutor can bring to bare. What Only Connect was doing was bringing together people who had developed their own ways of working as individuals and asking them to collaborate.

Even before the project started it became clear that this was causing problems and I decided that I would ask the tutors, for the first part of the project at least, to be responsible for their own work rather than try to work directly together in terms of subject matter and teaching methods. There was actually a lot to recommend this. First it gave a wider range of experience to the students – access to two different tutors with expertise in different areas and different teaching styles, and it also meant that Only Connect could gain data on a wider variety of approaches than it would have done if they had collaborated.

Technophobia
This is actually a projection. While the Only Connect tutors have had that usual run of frustrations you would expect trying to make the project work from a technical perspective, they are both confident computer users, certainly confident and competent enough to deal with the project. However, taking a broader view, it's important to understand that suddenly the kinds of irritations we all put up with as 'home users' of the internet become barriers to getting things done – it is not possible to sigh philosophically when a week's work from a student vanishes or your ISP is down for two days when you need to mail out tasks.

It's quite a list here. I am asking tutors to work in the open, to work collaboratively, to work with groups of students and design suitable tasks for them and to do all this remotely using unreliable technology. This list is loaded with implications for any LEA embarking on such a project – see Strategic Management for more on this. In the context of Only Connect, it's hardly surprising that such issues, dropped onto tutors all at once, created such a flurry of discussion.

But that's not all…

Dreams and Reality
The initial meeting between myself, Liz McQueen and the tutors in March 2000, was loaded with enthusiasm for the potential of on-line learning. We could do collaborative projects, web quests, have long and complex discussions with students in a MOO, the students could build web pages, create international links and so on. My major error was not to start back-peddling on this right from the beginning. It was clear to me that given a maximum of 12 weeks (it turned out to be 10) working with a group of de-schooled students, half of whom at this point didn't even have computers, with a wide range of abilities and needs we would be lucky if we could get some substantial e-mailed work up and running with hopefully a little collaborative work and some on-line chat.

Much of the prelaunch traffic was quite detailed discussion of such ideas which burned up a huge amount of time for all concerned and, while I think it made us all reflect deeply on the ideas and potential of on-line learning, it actually contributed little to the work that eventually went ahead.

The Internet is Big
And just chock full of possibilities. For many users it's a place where time can loose its meaning as we follow the fascinating pathways that open up. We can spend hours installing, configuring and exploring new internet applications which suddenly open up yet more possibilities. Home tutors can get sucked in as much as anyone and a notional 3 or 4 hours a week can become that per day.

In the end, it's all about discipline and focus in the tutors, but it's also about leadership and support from me, which is where I fell down badly. I wanted to keep the enthusiasm going, but failed to keep a sense of perspective.