Staff Development And E-Tutors Training
Sheena Banks1, Brigitte Denis2, Uno Fors3 and Sébastien
Pirotte2
University
of Sheffield1, University of Liège2, Karolinska Institutet3:
s.b.banks@sheffield.ac.uk,
b.denis@ulg.ac.be,
Uno.Fors@lime.ki.se,
SEB.Pirotte@ulg.ac.be
This paper considers the rationale for the training and staff development
of e-tutors. We then examine how this
is implemented in practice through the presentation of case studies from three
European universities. Finally we
analyse the differences and similarities of these case studies to exemplify
some principles for training models and guidelines for training of
e-tutors. We conclude that although it
is possible to identify these principles of good practice, there is great
flexibility and diversity of methods and approaches in the training and staff
development of e-tutors.
Staff development, teacher training, professional development, training
the trainers, e-tutors, university, e-learning
In web-based training, distant education and in most other
forms of e-learning, the teacher/tutor is very important, sometimes more
important than in traditional education. Furthermore, the role of the teacher
is different from traditional education and
teachers often need to be trained for these new roles. This presents a major challenge for
teachers, particularly in understanding how they can adapt their professional
practice from teaching in face-to-face contexts to teaching in virtual learning
environments. What forms of training
are most effective and how are these being developed?
This training can be performed in various ways and is sometimes
dependent on the specific course
context and/or learning situation that is to be taught. In this paper, we
exemplify and comment on a number of different approaches for teacher/staff
development at three different European universities. Adoption of training models, guidelines or training principles
can help us to operationalize and standardize the e-tutors’ interventions.
Different models of tutor training can be identified and applied to concrete
fieldwork (e.g. Salmon, 2000 ; Denis, 2003). One of our SIG goals is to propose
to the EQUEL partners to do some concrete fieldwork with them in the domain of
tutor training. That means to help them to design and/or to follow up tutors’
training sessions. These activities are based on the recommendations coming
from the literature analysis and the expertise of the SIG partners.
Three experiences of e-tutors’ and e-teacher’s training are presented
here and analysed. Those illustrations enhance the reflection on the
organisation and the efficiency of tutors’ training and provide recommendations
about it.
The Learn-Nett project
started in 1997 with the aim of
implementating a collaborative
learning environment at an interuniversity level to address the needs of future teachers or trainers using
Information Communication Technologies for Education (ICTE) (Charlier et
al.,1999a). The learners work at a distance and the course objectives are
concerned with (1) the collaboration process (to collaborate at a distance with
other students, to efficiently use
distance collaboration tools), (2) the product of the collaborative work (to
create or analyse an ICTE use using typologies to characterise it and
disseminate the product), (3) a reflexive process about the experience (describe and analyse the learning
experience).
In 2004, students of three countries (Belgium, France and Switzerland)
and seven institutions are involved
[see http://www.icampus.ucl.ac.be/LN2004/].
The learning environment includes several actors: local animators, tutors,
professors, learners and coordinators.
The local animator trains the students of his/her university in
pedagogical aspects (educational uses of ICTs, collaborative learning
concept…). He/she provides technical prerequisites and a hot line during the
project, works in collaboration with the professors and the tutors and
contributes to the regulation of the process. At the end of the project, he/she
organises an evaluation session with all the local actors.
A tutor is in charge of a group of learners from different universities
and interacts at a distance with them. Referring to Deschryver (2003), the
tutor's roles in such a distance collaborative learning environment aim at
building a community of users, clarifying the project, organising work and
ideas, helping to choose the relevant resources, evaluating the work (task and
collaboration process). It was found
necessary to train the tutors before starting the collaborative work, and training sessions have been organised since 1999 (Charlier et
al, 1999b).
The professor is responsible for the course at the university.
Officially, he/she defines the objectives, the number of hours to credit to
this work in the curriculum and the evaluation criteria. He/she can ask for information from the animator and/or the tutor. The learners are graduate or
postgraduate students enrolled in a course dealing with educational
technologies. The coordinator manages the project and he/she is the interlocutor between all the university partners.
In 2004 about fifty students are enrolled
and among the training staff, there are fifteen e-tutors, seven local animators
and seven teachers.
The first phase is a
technical and pedagogical preparation period: presentation of the objectives,
of the actors’ roles, of the planning and of the evaluation criteria. The
learners also state their expectations
of the project. As some competences are prerequisites to work collaboratively
at a distance, the animator trains - if necessary - the learners. The technical
training also includes a familiarisation with the Learn-Nett campus and its
tools.
The e-tutor starts intervening during the second phase (groups
constitution and first virtual contacts). After the choice of their project
topic, the learners will be enrolled in a group (maximum 5 students) including
students from two institutions. The tutors discuss together the groups
constitution, respecting as well as possible the learners’ topics first
choices. After, each tutor starts interacting with his/her group.A
videoconference is organised to meet each other. The third phase concerns the
clarification of the project, the division and the negotiation of tasks.
Regular interactions between the group and the tutor are then necessary. The
local animator also assists the learners.
The next steps are the realisation of the collaborative project and its
evaluation by the tutor and by peers. At the end, the learners publish their
work in the virtual campus space and write down a report on their learning
process.
The tutors' training
sessions are organised following the six phases of the Denis’ model (2003): (1)
experience of a distance learning system, (2) sharing representations ofthe
tutors’ roles, (3) definition of a tutor’s target profile, (4) consensus on
tutor’s roles and editing of a charter, (5) practical preparation and (6)
animation and feedbacks loops.
About fifteen tutors are enrolled in this training every year. It starts
with a one-day course where tutors can live and experiment the Virtual Learning
Environment (VLE) where they will work later. One of the objectives of this
session is to produce a common framework about tutor’s roles and interventions
and to and to reach agreement about these. After having presented the VLE philosophy
and its tools and resources, the participants share their representations on
what would be the e-tutor’s roles in Learn-Nett. First the future tutors
discuss in subgroups by chat with the help of a tutor (who is experienced in
tutoring collaborative groups) in order to produce their vision of the
e-tutor’s roles. Just after, during a plenary session, they submit their
conclusions to the whole group and a common e-tutor profile is agreed. The
common profile is edited and helps
the future tutors to remember their roles and to communicate them
to the learners. During another activity, short case studies are proposed
and the future tutors have to say how they would react to these situations. This helps to clarify what the limits of their roles are, considering that there exist other
educational actors (professors, “local animator’, etc) to whom specific tasks
are assigned. After this one-day training, a follow-up by phone conference,
forum,… is organized to ensure support to the tutors.
The common profile
defined is not standardized as the tutors intervene differently with the
groups. During the training sessions, the participants highlighted the need to
be proactive, especially if the learners
do not have individual autonomy
in attaining objectives such as the collaborative work organisation, the
search for relevant resources, the mutually agreed agenda. The degree of
proactivity can also vary from one phase of the project to another. The tutor’s
roles are focused on pedagogical and communicational processes and depends on
the specific situation and evolution of each group.
The Learn-Nett team organised three
training sessions for future tutors. Comparing two training sessions (one with tutor training
and one without) in the same collaborative learning system, we have observed
that these activities favour a certain coherence of the interactions between
the e-tutor’s and the learners in respect to the objectives of the learning
activities. Tutor training provides more equality in the interventions of the
different tutors.
At the University of
Sheffield School of Education, our approach to e-tutor training has been
developed because of the identified need to support academic staff in
developing their professional practice in e-tutoring. This is complex because the range of professional development
needs for e-tutoring goes beyond mastery of the technology and includes
pedagogic and managerial knowledge and skills as follows (Thompson ,1997):
Through our experience of running a virtual Masters programme in
E-Learning (http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/csnl) we have also developed a
course design that reflects the diversity of needs of participants and also the
diversity of forms of provision in training for e-tutors (Banks, Lally and
McConnell 2002). To meet the growing
expectations of staff in wanting to adapt their practice to technology-based
teaching and learning, there is a need for staff developers to develop forms of
provision to support the development of good practice to meet the growing
expectations of staff in wanting to adapt their pratice to technology-based
teaching and learning. There are still
gaps in provision of training the trainers programmes, as identified by
Alexander (1999).
In early 2003, we were commissioned by the LTSN Generic
Centre in the UK to run two virtual workshops in e-learning to help academic
staff develop an understanding of e-learning in their teaching. The target group
for the two courses was mainly teachers in Higher Education in the UK but also
staff responsible for staff training and development and support staff.
For this purpose, we designed the
workshops as virtual
learning communities that were
experiential in enabling participants to learn about e-learning and e-tutoring
while experiencing it for themselves.
The workshops had specific aims
and outcomes relating to the implementation of e-learning in different
contexts, pedagogy, student motivation and achievement, group work online,
collaborative learning, learning communities, course designs and
e-tutoring. Each workshop lasted for 18
hours over a three-week period. After
the first week of introduction and socialization, handouts and case studies related to key topics were posted and
discussed online. The role of the e-tutor was to create the community,
facilitate discussion, intervene at key points, and be a co-learner. Participants were supported by a variety of
resources, including articles and case studies on e-learning, documents posted
when required, hot links to web sites and a dedicated web site. In the final stage, all the activities
were reviewed and constituted a
resource for participants to continue their work. Our workshops were fully recruited within 10 days of advertising
them on the Web, with a long waiting list - indicating the market demand for
this kind of provision.
The participants valued
most the experience of being an online learner and the interactions with the
tutor and the other participants. The
tutor herself served as a model of an e-tutor through her facilitation and
communication style online. They also
valued the structuring of activities with specific learning outcomes related to
each activity and the provision of resources that could continue to be used
following the end of the workshop.
Although the online workshops were clearly successful, there were a
number of issues arising from the evaluation:
Time: the
heavy workload of many participants meant that they often struggled to
participate in the workshops and sometimes fell behind in the online activities
as a result. As they connected to the
workshops through their workplace, this restricted the time available for
participation.
Levels of
participation: there were three levels of participation in the
workshops - a high level of activity, a
low level of activity and non-participation.
Clearly time was a factor here, but we had several participants who did
not participate in the workshop but nevertheless reported that they had
benefited from it.
Confidence of
participants and managing diversity: there was great diversity in the
experience and knowledge of participants, ranging from novices to those with
specific responsibility for e-learning.
We required participants to post biographies as a means of building the
learning community, and several of those participants with less experience were
clearly intimidated by being in the same workshop as those they perceived as
being 'experts'. We will change our
methods for using biographies in the future.
Workload of
workshop facilitator: the short length of the workshops meant that there
was a concentrated timescale for achieving certain learning outcomes, and this
placed an unreasonable burden on the workshop facilitator in getting to know
the participants, facilitating the discussion and activities and keeping to the
timescale for covering all the topics.
This is another important reason for extending the timescale of the
workshop.
From this evaluation, we have concluded that this model of virtual tutor training through experiential
learning in a professional development context with online communication as the
medium for knowledge and skills development is very successful. However, adaptations need to be made to the
course design in terms of length of the course and to scaffold the online
activities in ways that acknowledge more explicitly the learning contexts of
both the tutor and the participants.
Karolinska Institutet
(KI) is a medical university with about 5000 students in 19 different
undergraduate programs, all focusing on medicine and healthcare. KI also has
2500 graduate (PhD) students, making KI as one of the largest medical
universities in Europe. Most teachers at KI are primarily considering
themselves as researchers, but with more or less educational obligations. Very
few of them have any formal pedagogical training. In year 2002, the board of
education at KI wanted to change this situation and initiated a number of
formal teacher training courses for KI teachers and later on, KI took the
decision that all teachers at KI should have at least three weeks of formal
pedagogical training. Today, year 2004, there are 16 different teacher-training
courses at KI, out of which two are dedicated to e-learning and
net-based/distant learning [http://www.lime.ki.se/cul_education_teacher.htm].
Some of the other courses also contain some examples of e-learning methods and
distant education. During the period 2002-2003 more than 500 teachers have
attended one or more of these courses.
The Net-based/distance
education (DE) teacher-training course (1 week) is set up as a two-step problem
based course for 20 teachers. In step 1 (2 days), the teachers are divided into
groups of 2-4 and after a short introduction of learning theories (incl. Biggs’
model on constructive alignment) and distance education basics, they are given
the task to create a course-plan for a fictitious DE course. This practical
task is mixed with more theories on learning and net-based learning tools and
practices. This part is ending with a general discussion on all developed
course plans and their pros and cons of them. This step allows even
inexperienced teachers to get theoretical and practical base to stand on when
trying to start thinking as an e-tutor.
The second step of the DE course is based on the teacher’s own courses,
where they are given the task to create a detailed course-plan, including
practical solutions to all ingoing activities. This part of the course is
performed on part-time basis during two weeks using Karolinska Institutet’s DE
platform PingPong allowing all teachers experience how it is to be a student in
a DE course). Support is given by the instructors via the platform only, and
the different teacher groups are also instructed to give comments on the other
group’s preliminary course plans and practical set-ups via the platform.
The course is ended with a physical meeting where all developed courses
are presented and discussed. Here, the role of the teacher and the role of the
students in DE courses are thoroughly discussed.
The first version of this course has recently been given, resulting on
very positive comments from the teachers. Most of all they appreciated the they
could work with their own courses and DE problems during the course, and many
of the teachers also pointed out that it was a good experience to be able to
use a DE platform during the course.
The second
teacher-training course at KI with focus on e-learning is a broader course,
covering a variety of e-learning tools, examples, experiences from courses and
practical pedagogical hints. This one-week course starts with a survey of
possible e-learning methods and their applicability to medicine and healthcare.
The course week is a mix of theory, demonstrations and practical work on
Web-based learning material, Visualisation & Simulation methods in medical
learning, planning of eLearning courses, copyright and intellectual properties,
the situation of the teacher and the student, video conferencing in learning
and a very brief introduction to distant education.
This course has been running since 2002 and is very popular amongst the
teachers at KI, most of them pointing out the good thing with seeing many
different applied examples from the field of medicine and being able to work
practically with a number of e-learning tools that they think might be able to
use in medical learning.
As mentioned above, the
teachers at KI have very seldom any formal pedagogical training. Even after
teaching for 20 years at KI, this is rare. Furthermore, most undergraduate
courses at KI are rather special for medical universities, contain many
laborative moments and are very often linked to clinical education and/or
practical medical skills.
This indicates the need of specialised teacher training courses, where
both the specifics of a medical university and the broad educational knowledge
must be combined into dedicated courses. Moreover, a mix of theories and
practise seems to be very important because of the lack of formal educational
training.
Our experience tells us that this might be possible to develop with good
results, but that even more specialised e-learning and net-based learning
courses might be needed. This might for example be needed for teachers of
clinical medicine (using for example net-based simulation of patient cases, net
based clinical learning resources etc) or teachers in laboratory courses
(virtual laboratories, internet based labs, etc). [For examples of specialized
medical e-learning systems, please refer to for example:
http://www.lime.ki.se/cul_research_et_projects.htm]. These kinds of specialized
and sometimes rather advanced simulation methods call for special course
set-ups [Bergin & Fors 2003, Bergin et al 2003] and thus, special
roles for teachers/tutors, which need to be trained. These types of highly
specialised teacher training courses are now under discussion at KI.
From these three case studies of e-tutor training, we can conclude that
applications of e-tutor training are very diverse in their modes of delivery,
use of technology and pedagogic methods.
However, we believe this diversity to be a strength because it demonstrates the flexibility of provision as
these case studies, while addressing different training contexts, also have much in common:
From this analysis, we conclude that while there is great diversity of
practice in the training and staff development of e-tutors, there are also some
principles of pedagogy and implementation that these courses have in
common. We also conclude that it is
possible to deploy a wide range of strategies in the training and staff
development of e-tutors and there is scope for further development in this
emerging field of practice to meet the growing expectations of teachers and
learners.
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