The Peer Educator Program at Old Dominion University is in need of a better system for digitally tracking and monitoring tutor and student interactions that are sanctioned by the University. Faculty and staff of the university who are responsible for tutoring services (or require their students to attend tutoring) have an interest in knowing who is signing up for tutoring and whether or not they are actually attending.
The current system of Old Dominion University is to have students and tutors work through a third party program, TutorTrac. This solution fails to integrate completely with ODU needs and circumstances. To use TutorTrac, students log in with their MIDAS IDs and can schedule appointments. When they arrive at the tutoring location, they log into the tutoring system to show that they were there. After the tutoring session, they log out of the tutoring system. A student can only miss so many scheduled sessions before their enrollment in the program may be reviewed.
Unfortunately, the system itself can be a hurdle for students seeking tutoring. The user interface is fairly unintuitive for a new student or tutor and requires much more manual data entry than is necessary. It is only available via the web (TutorTrac does not support 3rd party apps), and the mobile site is both less intuitive and less functional than the full site. If a student fails to log out after an appointment, the session must be manually closed by an administrator or it will be lost. Because PEP tutors are only paid when they tutor, this can pose problems for them as well. TutorTrac also does not support the sort of turn away and usage tracking needed to evaluate tutoring effectiveness and needs.
The current system, while workable, is quite cumbersome and generally restricts tutoring to specific lab environments due to the need for login kiosks. PEP would like to go mobile in order to expand the number of usable locations for tutoring on campus.
The PEP administrators have discussed the idea that equipping their tutors with iPads (intgrated with card scanners) could be a solution to the problem. This would both allow tutors to be positioned more freely around campus and allow for quick session sign on/off.
However, such a system would pose several more challenges:
- The school does not currently possess the equipment necessary to implement such a solution.
- Purchasing and assigning additional equipment presents its own problems in that mobile equipment is easily lost, stolen, and damaged. It will also require additional support staff.
- Communicating with TutorTrac via mobile devices has proven problematic.
- The cost and management effort required would heavily reduce the advantage gained by getting tutors out of fixed lab locations.