Abstract:

Application of e-learning tools highly modifies tutors’ requirement profiles. Once teachers deploy regular tutors as e-tutors, further competencies (e-skills) are needed to be able to coach students within academic settings. Most publications about education and training to qualified e-tutors show either unique or rather restrictive requirements or are highly extensive and therefore can’t be applied to university demands.

Therefore, this paper describes a procedure model enabling to consider university-specific requirements within education and training to e-tutors. The first step of our approach consists of a requirement analysis based on a preliminary questioning of teachers. Within oral interviews not only future tasks of e-tutors were collected (as well as prioritized) but also teachers’ understanding of e-tutors’ roles were evaluated. Consequently, poll results were used to develop a conceptual design of training that enables both specific prioritization and adaptation of the e-tutoring curriculum. Results pointed out that teachers demand specific e-skills from future e-tutors. Seeing this fact, our e-tutoring concept places major emphasis on e-moderation as well as on usage of communication tools.

To increase students’ motivation, our e-tutoring concept was broadened by utilization of videoconferencing. The application of videoconferencing as the major moderation tool enabled mediating new technology-related experiences to students. Within various videoconferencing sessions, students were able to face immediate coaching scenarios, to gain experience with direct tutoring behaviour and to develop competencies such as collaborative skills as well as emotional and didactic awareness.

In conclusion, it can be stated that videoconferencing highly supported students’ activities, participation as well as motivation within our e-tutoring training. Students also reported high overall contentedness, especially emphasizing immediateness of moderation-related experience and gaining insight into authentic tutoring scenarios. Above all, it should be mentioned that a fundamental aspect for the success of videoconferencing was its novelty, as this communication tool is not yet commonly used within teaching at brick and mortar university.

Keywords:

e-tutoring, videoconferencing, e-moderation, e-skills, motivation, requirement analysis.