That’s what former Kent State University President Lester Lefton says. Lefton served as president from 2006 to 2014, capping a 35-year-long career in higher education. Now, as a board chairman, he plays an advisory role in Kent State alum Michael Matousek’s brainchild, Luvo, an online note-sharing and on-demand tutoring service.
3 comments:
I think that there is a lot of potential with this idea of online tutoring for. My main question is will the tutor be a living person or a computer? If it is a computer, I do not think it will be as successful because they are programed, and what happens when a student’s question has not been programed? Now, if they are a real person than are they going to communicate with the student via a video chat or a by some sort of text based communication (like instant messaging)? I do not think the text based communication would be effective either because it can be very challenging to interpret the text. However, the video communication would be very successful because than the student can have a very personal conversation with the person who is tutoring them. I am interested to see how this all plays out as technology becomes bigger and bigger in our culture.
I really like this idea, and I think it has a lot of potential. Tutoring online presents a lot of problems. My mother who is a high school chemistry teacher, does a lot of private tutoring outside of her job, sometimes for people who live hours away, and the way that they communicate is over Skype, and instant messaging via Skype. Often, when ever my mother gets off of these Skype calls she is frustrated with the technology and how inconsistent it is. If she is frustrated I can;t imagine how frustrating it must be of the student who is making an outside effort to improve his or her understanding of the material. While I think the online tutoring con work just as well as face to face tutoring, there must be a level of sophistication in the technology that makes it easy for the two people to communicate, without glitches. I think that this is the direction tutoring is going, and I'm on board, if its done the right way.
I am always a believer that tutoring is a huge help when it comes to learning something that isn’t already in your repertoire of easily grasped information. Unfortunately I am not a supporter of online tutoring being the standard for colleges across the nation. It makes sense for high schools because idealistically everyone should be receiving the same level of education and learning the same information so that everyone has an equal opportunity for success in college. I view it different for college because I believe people get what they work and pay for and don’t view all colleges equal. I firmly believe some schools are better than others and all schools can teach different subjects at different levels of intensity. If this wasn’t true, it would make sense for anyone to go to an Ivy League school when they in theory could get the same level of education from their community college. For this reason I think online tutoring should be run and set up in a college by college basis because that will be the only way that students are guaranteed to get information and help from people who actually know what they are taking about because they have experienced the course before at the same school.
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