The Tutor.com Blog

Maker spaces are in. From libraries to 11 year-old web series stars, everyone is inviting everyone else to get in on this movement. Alternatively, as that new trend takes center stage we are seeing more articles about MOOC skeptics. Once the golden child of the higher education market, MOOCs are seeing resistance and some backlash from universities and their leaders. Check out our top reads on these hot topics below!

A Science Star Already, Tinkering With the Idea of Growing Up via The New York Times Sylvia Todd’s desk is not tidy. It’s cluttered with small robots, motors, wires, resistors, a soldering iron and an array of other gadgets and tools. A maker, tinkerer and online celebrity, Sylvia has attracted more than 1.5 million YouTube views of the show she produces and hosts, the Web-based “Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Maker Show.”

Meet Your Makers via Publishers Weekly ….in the past 18 months, a growing number of libraries have been taking a much more radical approach: creating “maker” spaces. Based on the idea that libraries are for creation, not just consumption, maker spaces don’t just upend the normal programming model—they have the potential to reinvent the public library.

Why Some College Are  Saying No to MOOC Deals, at Least for Now via The Chronicle of Higher Education Amherst College, known for its selectivity, is accustomed to sending rejection notices. But when the liberal-arts beacon this month turned down an invitation to join the exclusive partnership of colleges offering massive open online courses through edX, it nonetheless drew surprise from many corners of academe.

MOOC Skeptics at the Top via Inside Higher Ed It would be easy to think that the leaders of American higher education are all in when it comes to MOOCs. Dozens of colleges and universities — many of them among the elites — have rushed to offer massive open online courses. Top foundations back the effort. The American Council on Education has moved quickly to certify some of the courses as credit-worthy. Many other colleges are considering plans to award credit for MOOCs or to use them in instruction.

Miss a top read? Share yours with us in the comments section below!

We’ve been making the rounds at tradeshows this month and the hot issue continues to be how to increase student retention and persistence.  Public, private, 2-year and 4-year colleges – everyone is facing this challenge.

“Big Data” projects—a catch-all term for leveraging existing data to identify at-risk students and get them the support they need—is rising to the top as a key solution, but will it work?  Here’s a breakdown of the issues big data can solve for schools, as well as challenges schools will face while trying to implement data projects that drive results.

Challenges to Successful Big Data Projects

• Getting Reliable Data:  Faculty adoption of SIS/LMS systems is an ongoing issue, and when student data (like grades, attendance, information from residence hall advisors, etc) doesn’t live in an electronic system, it’s hard to pull into a big data project.

• Losing the Silos:  Colleges and universities that are collecting data share that much of it gets put into a silo—a closed system where many key decision-makers don’t have access to it.  For big data projects to work effectively, all the relevant data needs to be in one place where analysis can take happen.

• Implementing System-Wide Improvements: Using data to inform interventions on a student-by-student level is important, but the real promise of big data is that it can improve instructional design and address retention problems systematically. Schools will need a structure to review data and make these larger decisions campus-wide.

Data Solutions

Some schools are running their own Big Data projects, while others are turning to outside partners to make the process easier.  Regardless of the approach your college takes, you’ll want to make sure your data project solves these issues:

• The Silo Effect: Breaking down the silos and putting all information from diverse sources (whether it’s SIS/LMS, financial aid, demographics, residence halls, advisors, etc) into one system that can be accessed by different groups on campus for a variety of needs.

• Trend Spotting: A data project should be able to leverage information in new ways to predict which students are at risk for failure/withdrawal/dropout and mobilize the proper resources to mitigate these risks.

• The Big Three:  Steering financial, advising and academic resources to at-risk students to boost persistence.

While Tutor.com is best known for our online tutoring solutions, we also offer comprehensive data and analytic services that can be plugged into just about any data project.

Tutor.com’s Predictive Insights™ Data Analysis provides immediate and actionable data on what students are struggling with (at the subject, topic and application level), when they’re looking for extra help, and what techniques our tutors used to help students break through and achieve mastery.  Students who lack prerequisite knowledge or struggle to achieve mastery of core concepts are flagged by our expert tutors for early alerts, which can be sent to faculty and advisors as email notifications.  Administrators may also review this data regularly, often catching issues long before other systems would have reported a problem.

Is your university implementing a big data project?  Tell us and your peers  about it in the comments section!

We’re just weeks into 2013 and Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs continue to be the hot topic in higher education. A recent New York Times cover story follows the progress of Coursera, Udacity, Udemy and other institutions such as MIT and Harvard that are all spending money to offer free courses. While MOOCs continue to evolve with new ideas ranging from how to provide proctored exams and grant certificates of completions, we’re more focused on the online courses that students are really taking.

According to Changing Course:  Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States, a collaborative effort between the Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board, more students are taking online courses each year. Not a MOOC, but a credit-bearing course provided by one of the many schools that offer online classes. The survey found that the number of online enrollments have been steadily increasing as a proportion of total enrollments from 11.7% back in 2003 to 32% in 2011.

This is the trend worth watching. Students choose online courses for a variety of reasons, but perhaps top of the list is convenience. As more non-traditional students go back to school they must juggle work, family and school. The good news is that 77% of chief academic officers report that the learning outcomes from online classes to be the same, somewhat superior or superior to face-to-face classes.

We don’t see an end to this trend of online classes, but it is not without challenges. How do schools support students they may never see? And how can they support professors who may be spending more time and energy creating these classes? Many are choosing online tutoring as a key tool. Online tutoring supports students and professors because it is:

• Available 24/7 while on-campus tutoring centers and professors must have more limited hours to provide help
• Accessible from any mobile device from tablets to smart phones
• High quality with a community of vetted tutors ready to provide instruction in anything from essay writing to advanced statistics
• Personalized to the student’s needs
• A data-rich tool that provides an in-depth look at students’ challenges

While many schools may bring in online tutoring to support their online students, they quickly realize that online tutoring can benefit all students.

While many questions surround the future of MOOCs as you can see in Revolution in Higher Education by George Cigale founder of Tutor.com, online courses at accredited universities are here to stay. Continuing to support students to successfully complete their online coursework may not be the hot topic, but it’s the one that matters right now.

If you’re working on a “big data” project or just trying to better understand your students, you’ll want to learn more about Predictive Insights™ Data Analysis Service from Tutor.com.  Our new, enhanced reporting program complements early alert systems and student support programs.

Predictive Insights gives you actionable data about the students using Tutor.com online tutoring services.  You’ll receive both individual student reports and aggregate trend data about cohorts of students.  This real-time analysis is available when you need it to help you allocate resources, support staff and students.

For individual students, Predictive Insights provides a detailed student report that shares the subject(s) the student has sought help in and if the student has been flagged by a tutor as not having the prerequisite knowledge needed. These immediate and regular reports empower you to provide support to the right students at the right time.

Predictive Insights also tracks and reports trends across groups of students. In this example, we can see that 23% of students needed a tutor’s help to understand multiplying, dividing and factoring expressions while only 1% needed help with patterns. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of student cohorts gives faculty and administrators a powerful tool for change.

Contact us to see additional sample report charts and learn more about Predictive Insights.  We’d love to hear how we can help you put your data to work!

MOOCs or massive open online courses are taking the higher education world by storm! George Cigale, Tutor.com’s founder and CEO is taking a course this semester and wrote more about what will make MOOCs successful on his blog, CEOTutor.  Check out George’s post and our top reads from the last few months that cover this hot topic.

MOOC Brigade: Will Massive, Open Online Courses Revolutionize Higher Education? via Time MOOC may be a silly-sounding acronym, but this new breed of online classes is shaking up the higher education world in ways that could be good for cash-strapped students and terrible for cash-strapped colleges.

The Year of the MOOC via New York Times Massive open online courses are the educational happening of the moment. Everyone wants in. No one is quite sure what they’re getting into.

What we’re learning from online education via TED Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, is enticing top universities to put their most intriguing courses online for free – not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn.

Did we miss any of the top MOOC articles? Let us know in the comments section below!

In 2009, Ohio University Lancaster Campus (OUL) set out on a mission. The faculty identified the need to provide tutoring to OUL’s 2,000+ students, but struggled to figure out how to staff such a center. Many of OUL’s students transfer to Ohio University’s main campus after two years, so the students who could potentially be tutors were transferring by the time they reached the appropriate level. So with the challenges addressed, OUL set out on its mission of finding an accessible, easy-to-use, and effective tutoring solution.

What developed from there is OUL’s successful Tutor Tracks program. Designed by one of their own, Dr. Giorgi Shonia, Assistant Professor, Mathematics, Tutor Tracks is a three pronged web-based solution. Included in the program is a database of faculty resources, the ability to connect to a live tutor working out of the OUL’s Learning Center and lastly, access to Tutor.com. Adding an outside resource to the plan was crucial to provide the 24/7 support OUL hoped for. Chosen for its special features, reporting and data evaluation, and competitive pricing, Tutor.com fit in perfectly with the two other legs of the program.

While the program is still in its early years, it’s clear that the students receiving help are already calling it a success. 100% of student users are glad that OUL is offering Tutor.com and report that it is helping them to improve their grades. And its popularity is growing, not just for students. According to Debora Smith, Assistant Professor, Health Technology, when the program first launched in the 2010-11 academic year online education wasn’t as widespread –or respected –as it is now. But just two years in and professors who were hesitant at first have become the programs greatest supporters. Deborah added, “Online tutoring isn’t just effective, it’s essential. This is a tool that can teach people how to learn. Online tutoring increases confidence in students’ ability to learn.”

Read more about our partnership with Ohio University Lancaster Campus here.

Cherie Mazer, Ed.M., Harvard University Graduate School of Education, has released a new report, Online Tutoring: A New Retention and Remediation Solution for Colleges. The report, commissioned by Tutor.com, investigates the extent of the remediation and retention crisis in our higher education system and the role online tutoring can serve in addressing the issue.

Click here to download the full whitepaper.

While the number of students enrolling in undergraduate degree programs has increased 34 percent from 2000 to 2009, the number of those students who are unprepared for college has increased proportionately and is staggeringly high. Fully 60% of students entering community college require at least one remedial course. Remediation is expensive—students taking these courses pay full tuition, yet may receive no college credit. Worse yet, according to Remediation: Higher Education’s Bridge to Nowhere published by Complete College America only 36% of students in remedial courses finish those courses and associated college-level coursework in two years time.

Ms. Mazer’s report highlights research studies specifically focusing on the efficacy of online tutoring in higher education settings. The studies cited determined that students studied achieved improved content knowledge, had better attitudes about seeking help, higher retention rates, and also preferred virtual tutoring over face-to-face interactions.

Recent data also suggests that individualized, live tutoring—in a virtual environment—is an effective means to address retention and remediation. Potential factors include:

• Online platforms allow distance learners—whose retention rates can be very low—with the flexibility they need to fit in the tutoring they need;
• Low-performing students are less threatened or embarrassed to seek help using an electronic system, rather than work directly with a face-to-face tutor;
• The scalable nature of online tutoring allows institutes of higher education to serve more students.

Black Hawk College in Illinois is an example of one institution that serves a diverse student body and is striving to make resources and support accessible and viable to all students by including online tutoring as part of their services.

“Our students balance jobs and families and online tutoring allows us to support them in ways our on-site tutoring cannot provide,” explained Kari Koster the Student Success Center Director at Black Hawk College. “Many of our students are under-prepared and only about 57% advance from their first remedial course. Online tutoring has been part of our larger retention efforts, including supplemental instructions services, First Year Experience program (in development) and an Early Alert System.  We need to continue to make resources accessible to our students in multiple formats to provide support and facilitate learning.”

What is your college doing to address retention and remediation issues?

April was the Month of the Military Child, National Library week, and a variety of holidays from Earth Day, to Poem in your Pocket Day, to Patriots Day. Even though it was full of events, the debates on remediation in college, flipped K-12 classrooms, and e-tablets continued on. Those debates and more were the focus of our top reads this month. What were yours?

Have Increased Graduation Rates Artificially Depressed America’s 12th-Grade Performance? via EducationNext.org: One of the great mysteries of modern-day school reform is why we’re seeing such strong progress (in math at least, especially among our lowest-performing students) at the elementary and middle school levels, but not in high school.

With A New Educational Platform, TED Gives Teachers The Keys To A Flipped Classroom via TeleCrunch: As an increasingly powerful medium through which the world’s experts share their hard-won knowledge, TED is also an educator. In March, the organization launched the first phase of its “TED-Ed” initiative, in practice a series of a dozen short animated YouTube videos “created for high school students and lifelong learners,” in the big picture an invitation to teachers to collaborate with TED to create more effective video lessons that can be used in classrooms.

Report: College remediation fails students via Brownsville Herald: A new study released Wednesday faults college remediation programs for failing struggling students, but local trends suggest public schools have significantly helped lower the need for development education.

The rise of e-reading via PEW: One-fifth of American adults (21%) report that they have read an e-book in the past year, and this number increased following a gift-giving season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tablet computers and e-book reading devices such as the original Kindles and Nooks. In mid-December 2011, 17% of American adults had reported they read an e-book in the previous year; by February, 2012, the share increased to 21%.

Soure: Remediation: Higher Education’s Bridge to Nowhere, Complete College America

The stats are staggering:  51.7% of students entering a 2-year college and 19.9% of students entering a 4-year college are in remediation. And of those taking remedial courses, only 62% of 2-year college students and 74.4% of 4-year college students complete remediation. Even fewer complete remediation and associated college-level courses within two years. With 1.7 million students in remedial courses at a cost of $3 billion to states and students, it’s time to take a harder look at remediation solutions.

That’s just what the non-profit organization Complete College America did with their recently released report, “Remediation: Higher Education’s Bridge to Nowhere”. Relying on data from 31 states, the report takes a hard look at what’s going wrong with remediation and how to fix it to create a clear path to graduation for millions of more students.

The report shares compelling statistics as well as success stories from colleges around the country that have been implementing changes the group suggests including:

• Redesigning college classes with just-in time tutoring and support
• Moving extra academic help to be a co-requisite not a pre-requisite
• Working with high schools to provide transitional classes and earlier testing to see if students are on a college track
• Forcing students to choose a course of study right away

As a provider of online tutoring and academic support for 2-year and 4-year colleges and universities across the country, Tutor.com has seen firsthand how supplementing instruction with just-in time tutoring delivers results. And after a decade of delivering one-to-one, on-demand tutoring we have a good sense of why it works.

Anytime Help Motivates Students

The frustration of not “getting it” drives many students to tune out and then drop out of the challenging math and science coursework that they need for college. Once they are placed in remediation classes the same issues arrive. The introduction of 24/7 on-demand help from expert tutors gives students the support they need to ask the “dumb” questions and attain the skills they never learned in high school.

“Knowing I could connect to a tutor…whenever I needed to gave me the motivation to keep going and get the work done. The tutors always gave me encouragement and they gave me motivation to stick it out. It really helped my confidence, “ explained Melissa S a college sophomore referring to her experience getting on-demand help from Tutor.com for math help through high school and college. “I can’t picture my academic career without it. I don’t think I would have even tried to take college level calculus without Tutor.com.”

Unlike other intervention programs, Tutor.com is introduced the day a course starts and is available to students throughout the semester for help just when they need it. This on-demand approach to learning lets a student seek ongoing help and encourages them to complete more assignments, be better prepared for class and more engaged in the classroom and their own learning.

Working one-to-one with experienced tutors also helps students learn at their own pace and on their own terms – they choose when to get help and how much help they need. Embedding tutoring time into the class schedule gives students a healthy dose of one-to-one time to work out their own problems and keep up with the class pacing and assignments.

While online and on-demand tutoring support may not solve all of the remediation issues facing colleges, it’s a compellingly good start.

To learn more about the Tutor.com College Center, please visit www.tutor.com/higher-education.

March kicked off conference season here at Tutor.com. We headed to Philly for Innovations 2012 hosted by the League for Innovation, to Chicago for the T³ International Conference and then ended the month back in Philly for both the Public Library Association Conference and the ASCD Annual Conference. Suffice it to say, we have been busy! Throughout our travels however, we’ve stayed on top of trends in the marketplace. From the beginnings of a national effort to adopt digital textbooks, to a PEW report focusing on the ever changing demands of libraries in hard economic times, to Connecticut legislation moving away from remedial college classes, a lot has been going on. Check out our top reads below!

U.S. Officials Tackle National Adoption of Digital Textbooks  via Education Week: The Federal Communications Commission, the newly formed LEAD Commission, and the U.S. Department of Education met today with textbook publishers and technology providers in Washington to discuss the future of digital textbooks in K-12 classrooms.

The Library in the City: Changing Demands and a Challenging Future report via Pew: Big-city public libraries have rarely been as popular as they are today and rarely as besieged. The hard economic times of recent years have generated increased demand for the free and varied services libraries provide, even as revenue-challenged local governments have cut back on contributions to library budgets. All this comes at a time when libraries are being asked to perform a new and changing range of functions. This report looks at how Philadelphia is faring and the challenges facing urban libraries across America.

Measure Would End No-Credit Remedial Classes at Colleges via The Hartford Courant: Students at community colleges who take at least one remedial course are about half as likely to graduate in three or four years as students who don’t. Now state lawmakers have gotten behind legislation that would eliminate no-credit remedial college classes by 2014, replacing them with regular credit-bearing classes that come with embedded remedial support for students who need it.

Tutor.com App Now Available Through Boopsie via Boopsie.com: Tutor.com and Boopsie, the leading mobile solution for universities and libraries worldwide, announced the availability of Tutor.com through the Boopsie platform. The partnership will make it easy for library patrons whose libraries subscribe to both services to access a live tutor anytime, anywhere through the Boopsie native mobile app.

Educational Opportunity for Military Children via The Huffington Post: The vast majority of the 1.2 million school-aged military children attend public schools. While there are schools that are models of how to support military students, most are still not equipped to help these students manage the stresses of military life. Worse, many school districts, including some near military bases, have no idea if there are military students in their classrooms, let alone how many. How can schools support military students if they don’t know who they are?

Did we miss something? Let us know what your top read for March was in the comments section below.

It’s show season here at Tutor.com! We’ve been on the road non-stop to see our growing number of college and university clients. Our last trip was to Philadelphia for Innovations 2012 – a show that focuses on the community college experience.

More community colleges are offering online tutoring to complement their on-campus support centers to help retain students and get them through challenging courses. With the rise of non-traditional students—who are already busy with jobs and families—convenient, around-the-clock support is becoming a necessity. Online tutoring from Tutor.com has the added benefit of being available from any mobile device including tablets. Recent surveys show that 25% of college students now rely on tablets to do their course reading.  With Tutor.com, they can easily connect to a tutor for help from their tablet too.

If you missed the show and are thinking about bringing online tutoring to your school, you’re in luck! Below are the answers to the top three questions your colleagues asked at our booth. Have more? Email us at highered@tutor.com.

•  How’s Tutor.com different from other online tutoring options available to colleges?

Tutor.com is really at the forefront of creating the most innovative solutions for colleges’ support challenges. We are the only online tutoring service that is always on-demand and 24/7 for all the subjects we offer. And, Tutor.com is leading the way when it comes to mobile solutions. Your students can connect to a tutor from Apple or Android devices – phones and tablets. We also know that offering flexible transparent pricing is what colleges need, so we deliver that too.

• What hours are the tutors available?

Our tutors are available at dawn, noon and midnight!  Whenever your students are studying, our tutors are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

• How long have you been doing business?

Tutor.com began offering high-quality online tutoring when your freshman class was in kindergarten! We’ve had over a decade to innovate, learn and create a service that gets a 97% recommend rate from millions of students.

If you want to learn more about online tutoring and student support, come see us at the APSCU 2012 Convention & Expo in Las Vegas, NV, June 20-22, at Booth #107.

$500 million in grant funds is available to community colleges and other eligible institutions of higher learning thanks to the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training grant program otherwise known at TAACCCT.

If you’re working on a grant application, you know that one of the five core elements required by every potential grantee is Online and Technology-Enabled Learning.  This is defined as

“…..innovative and sophisticated applications of technology, including online, hybrid and/or technology-enabled strategies. These strategies should effectively teach content to students, enable students to teach themselves and each other, and/or allow students to engage in hands-on learning. Online and technology-enabled learning strategies can support competency-based assessment models and models for accelerated learning.

Examples of innovative online or technology-enabled learning methods include interactive simulations, personalized and virtual instruction, educational gaming, and strategies for asynchronous and real-time collaboration among learners and instructors.”

Personalized Learning and Collaboration

Tutor.com is a cost-effective online learning tool that offers personalized, virtual and real-time instruction and collaboration for college students in core curriculum classes.  Tutor.com’s community of 2,500 qualified subject experts creates a personal learning experience for every student.  Our tutoring model ensures that students are taught in a way that they master the concepts they are struggling with and have the tools to tackle the next similar challenging on their own.

Tutor.com’s College Center also includes robust career services and career tutors who can help students with job searching, creating resumes and preparing for job interviews.

If you’d like to learn more about Tutor.com and how our on-demand, online tutoring and career services fit into your TAACCCT grant, contact Sandi White, VP, Higher Education at swhite@tutor.com.  To learn more about Tutor.com’s services visit www.tutor.com/higher-education.