Supporting a virtual community of tutors in experience capitalising

Abstract

Nowadays, Information and Communication Technologies change the way students learn. Many researches focus on the development of new forms of pedagogy and software for student learning. But ICT also involve changes in teachers' roles, which are not yet well defined in particular for on-line tutors. In this paper, we present new ways for tutors to define their own "professional identity", their functions and "good practices". By providing a platform to develop communities of practice of tutors, we aim at giving them the possibility to share knowledge, experiences and to refer to them in their day-today practice. We detail the interface to classify and retrieve experiences stored as knowledge in a database.

A Knowledge Management System and Social Networking Service to Connect Communities of Practice

“…The terminal nodes correspond to CoPs. This taxonomy of tutoring has been developed by an iterative process [14], based on interviews with six tutors (first development cycle) and on results of an experiment of a first prototype (second development cycle). The classification cannot be exhaustive because it is only a base which will evolve through modifications and additions made by the ICP members themselves.…”

“…Each cycle rests on the development of a prototype, on its evaluation by the users by means of interviews or experiments and on the analysis users' activity [14]. This approach aimed at making users' needs emerge, at leading users to explicit these needs.…”

INTERCONNECTION OF COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE - A Web Platform for Knowledge Management

“…Each cycle rests on the development of a prototype, on its evaluation by the users by means of interviews or experiments and on the analysis users' activity (Garrot et al, 2009). This approach aimed at making users' needs emerge, at leading users to explicit these needs.…”

“…Our work is illustrated throughout the article by the example of tutoring, which we define as the educational monitoring of learners during courses. CoPs of tutors from different educational institutions prepare their own pedagogical contents for their students, and there is currently no possibility of reusing and sharing them (Garrot et al, 2009). The result of this is that tutors lack help in their day-to-day practice, professional identity and practice sharing.…”

The Development of TE-Cap: An Assistance Environment for Online Tutors

“…We conducted seven interviews with tutors of different institutions, with different backgrounds and from different disciplines (educational sciences, computer science, training to set-up blended learning, use of ICT in education and training). These interviews were based on a literature survey on tutor roles in distance learning [5]. Several questions guided these interviews: What are the experiences and the initial skills of tutors?…”