Maintaining an Effective Online Learning Environment and the Role of the E-Tutor: The University of Education, Winneba Experience

Abstract

Understanding the importance of the changing role of tutors about the skills needed to achieve an effective online teaching and learning is paramount to a successful online course and programme at large. This paper explores the new roles and responsibilities of some faculty members of the University of Education, Winneba (UEW), who have been engaging in online tutoring activities for two years. There is an increasing quest to bring everyone on board for the growing interest in e-learning at UEW. However much is not known about the experiences of e-tutors regarding the roles they have been playing in online facilitation. The successful stories, the challenges and what mechanisms exist for improving the practice are very key. In the paper, we discuss the success factors and challenges and approaches required to support lecturers. A qualitative approach using a semi-structured interview guide was employed in collecting data from ten (10) purposively sampled lecturers who teach different courses at UEW. Among the key findings are that it is the tutors' role to initiate the learning processes, moderate students' participation and lead students in discovery mode of learning. Further, as managers and leaders in the learning process they bring students together through

The Virtual Tutor: Tasks for conversational agents in Online Collaborative Learning Environments

“…The termini teacher, online teacher, instructor, facilitator, tutor, and e-tutor are used in literature and are named e-tutors in this study. The focus for this publication is to inquire task automation for etutors via conversational agents [14,41,51,53].…”

“…E-tutors also improve collaborative learning conditions and gives direct instructions in form of content related information about tasks, summing up and confirming postings, clearly communicated expectations about presence and participation (e.g. to take on more responsibility or management roles), encouraging students to work together or emphasizing norms of behavior [6,14,29].…”

“…Therefore, the etutor is responsible for a clear presentation of the designed online instructions to the students to facilitate their growing understanding of course content. According to Essuman & Appiah-Boateng [14], the tasks can be classified in managerial and pedagogical teaching design. The focus of managerial teaching tasks is on the provision of contents and objects (e.g.…”

“…Pedagogical teaching tasks especially include the provision of insights from the subject knowledge and experience using questions to encourage students' responses. Furthermore, the cognitive task management requires students to actively engage in processing information [14,23,51].…”

“…At the beginning of an online course, they first ensure that all participants can access to the networking systems and stored materials. During the online phase, e-tutors deal with issues of learner registration, security, record keeping and locating alternative paths [14,19,41].…”