How to be an Online Tutor

Online courses are a hot topic in education just at the moment. Many institutions think they can attract more students and funding by simply putting courses onto their web sites and waiting for the recruitment graph to shoot up immediately. Unfortunately, not many of them have either the experience or support systems to offer tutors the training necessary for this new type of delivery.

A group of colleges in South Yorkshire saw a gap in the market and produced a course to meet this need - called 'Learning to Teach On-Line'. This book has been written by someone who was both a student and a tutor on the course, so it certainly comes with the benefit of first-hand experience. It starts with a quick survey of the advantages of online learning, then describes the Internet and how it might be used by a few typical students.


It covers email, netiquette, and conferencing systems; course planning, design, and assessment; then supporting learners and evaluating the course. You would imagine that this covers everything the new recruit would need.

But unfortunately, it's all discussed in an amazingly sketchy manner. Video conferencing gets two short paragraphs for instance; and under 'Course Design', learner activity is covered in one sentence. There's nothing at all on the technical matters of FTP transfers, bandwidth, file conversion, zipping and unzipping - all the things which commonly dominate the attention of online learners.

This publication is basically just field notes from the world of open/distance/online learning. It might be of interest to some poor soul who has been commanded by a head of department to 'look into this online learning business and get some courses up and running'. If no other support materials are to hand, it could offer a very slender lifeline. But to stay afloat you will still need to do a lot more reading, technical training, and sheer hard work beyond reading this.