HCC’s Online Tutoring Program:Improving Student Success

Stephen Levey, Ed.D.Associate Vice Chancellor, Academic Instruction

Deborah HardwickManager, Online Tutoring

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About Houston Community College . . .

Afr-Amer

Hispanic Asian White Other0

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40% Student Demographics by Ethnicity

• Educates more than 75,000 students per semester

• 1st for international student enrollment among U.S. community colleges

• Highly diverse student population:

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What Were We Looking to Do?

Use Online Tutoringto Increase:

Access Success

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Use Technology. Don’t Let it Use You!

“While technology is not a panacea, it must be an

integral part of any redesign focused on

increased completion.”

Nodine, T., Venezia, A., and Bracco, K. (2011) Changing Course:

A Guide to Increasing Student Completion in Community Colleges

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Operational Procedures Loop

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Assess

Do Decide

Plan

Develop a plan to implement service and measure the impact of online tutoring on student success.

Implement service and conduct quantitative

research.

Assess results of the program.

Implement improvements,

conduct additional research.

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Research Findings

• 937 tutoring sessions (units) observed

• For every one-unit increase in tutoring usage per semester, student GPA increased by approximately .05 points.

• Among all students observed:

GPA

Service Users 2.915

Non-Users 2.685

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Future Recommendationsfor Research

Increased Outreach

Track Demographic

Groups

Track Subject Areas

Study Effect on Retention and

Completion

Future Research

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Summary

Online Tutoring:

• Addresses two of the primary commitments/tenets of the community college – increased access and student success

• Addresses a large, diverse student population

• Uses technology instead of letting technology use us

• Implements the HCC institutional effectiveness model

• Uses research to validate effectiveness of the service and plan for the future

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And so it began …

• 2003 - Northwest College and Distance Ed began using an external online tutoring service.

• April, 2006 - The Academic Dean, Southwest College, asked English tutoring supervisor to investigate doing the same.

• April, 2006 – Meeting held with Tutors “R” Us sales rep and several English teachers. Problems with oversight uncovered. “Why can’t we do it ourselves?”

• Sept. 11, 2006 – We went live.

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Understanding HCC

To understand the complexity we had to overcome in order to develop our online

tutoring program,

it is necessary to visualize the organizational structure of the institution.

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Basic Numbers

In September 2006, it took us 11 days to receive 100 papers.

Today, we average about 100 submissions per day.

Since September 11, 2006 …• 29,448 students have registered and used the system.• Tutors have worked 34,865 hours.• Tutors have responded to 63,226 student submissions.

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Challenges

1. Money

2. Territoriality

3. Supervision

4. 14 different schedules at 14 tutoring centers

5. 5 different organizational modes

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Challenges (continued)

6. Varying skill sets from tutors

7. Varying levels of supervision and oversight

8. No coordination among programs

9. Minimal record keeping

10. To get started, we had to get the support of…

Five academic deans,

Five workforce deans,

Five student service deans,

Five presidents,

Five English department chairs, and

Five English tutoring supervisors.

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Our Pre-Launch Goals

• Make English tutoring available all the time to everyone.

• Increase student’s skills and comfort levels.

• Save overhead and increase efficiency, thus making more money available for tutor salaries.

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Critical Decisions

Technology

We choose to work with Askonline.net, a company that only provides tutoring support technology. It offers a variety of formats, archiving, reporting and tech support. We look at Askonline as a partner, not just a vendor.

Content (Tutors)

We choose to hire current and recent ex-HCC faculty as tutors.

Marketing

We choose to market ourselves very aggressively among all our constituent groups.

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Our Constituents

Students

Faculty

HCC in General

The Online Tutoring Profession

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Money Matters

When all the costs are added up…

Self-staffed online tutoring costs less than externally-staffed for-hire companies, and the non-monetary rewards are so much greater.

As a result of our increasing efficiency and knowledge…

Our per-contact costs have fallen from $12.65 / contact in fiscal 2008/2009 to $10.23 today.

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Find-a-Tutor

The Chancellor’s Innovation Fund

provided a small grant so we could develop a searchable database of all tutoring at HCC.

(Screenshots of Find-a-Tutor can be found in your packets.)

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The Tutoring Toolbar

We developed a toolbar that allows for consistency and speed in commenting on papers.

We share this toolbar with faculty at HCC and schools around the country that use self-staffed online tutoring.

(The toolbar and an explanation of the buttons can be found in your packet.)

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Summary

Managed appropriately, online tutoring is an economical, efficient, personal and professional answer to student needs,

and it works!

Online tutoring is the future!