Baffled by the tutor tab

Support & Feedback Forum
1

Ok, I have to admit that after being a tutor forfive days I am now baffled and a tiny bit stressed. Not by the students, they are lovely, but by the tutor pages on lingQ. Here’s the sequence of events:

  1. I created lots and lots of 1-on-1 sessions and a few group discussions for the rest of October.
  2. I thought about it for a while, then went back and deleted a lot of the 1-on-1 sessions, adding some more group discussions.
  3. I made a cup of tea, washed up and watched Heros, after which I couldn’t remember when I had group discussions and when I had 1-on-1s. Not a problem, I thought, because there is a page which shows what you have coming up over the next few days. It is headed tutor home.

The problem is that group discussions don’t show up on tutor home until someone has signed up for them. If I get your students signing up only 15 minutes before the discussion is due to start (and it was a pleasure to talk to you, ladies!), not only do I not realise I have students, but I don’t even know that there is a discussion with me scheduled. I can’t remember and I can’t see an easy way to find out, other than to use another scheduling solution (e.g. pen and paper) when I create the discussions in the first place. I know about using the calendar function to create events, but I can’t see how to view them in a list or how to edit them afterwards.

How do other tutors manage to keep track of events?

While we’re on the subject, could we maybe have a tutors’ forum where we can share ideas and problems with other tutors?

2

Hi Helen, I add the events in my outlook when I receive a mail that a student sign up for a lesson. So I’m allways up to date and my mobile phone also knows my events.

3

Hi Helen,

I apologize that the tutor tab is not as user friendly as it could be. It is functional but needs some work to make things clearer. However, we have to concentrate on improving things now that affect the majority of our users. Tutors will have to muddle along! :slight_smile:

Regarding your questions, you don’t have to delete 1 on1 times to create group conversations at the same times. If you create a conversation during some of your available time, that time is replaced by the conversation you create. If you create an hour long conversation, that hour of available time is no longer available.

Group conversations do show in your My Conversations list whether there are participants or not, although the list itself is limited to the next 10 events, I believe. If you use the calendar filter on the right you can change the start date of the list to see future events. You can also look on your Calendar which displays all events for the month which can be clicked on for further detail.

A tutor’s forum is a good idea and is something we will look into.

4

Oh Helen,

this sounds like a lot of work for you. For me it is still clear, because I have not many students for German yet. I saw, that Allison write her 1-on-1s in the group discussions “only for …” Maybe this is helpful for scheduling, but I think the best is your personal scheduler, like outlook.

A forum for tutors would be good!

5

We do have the tutor central blog which is not used very often.

http://thelinguist.blogs.com/tutorcentral/

I will talk to Mark about setting up a Tutors’ Corner within the Linguist Forum, for existing or aspiring tutors. It will be open to anyone and can help us recruit more tutors.

Remember that we want more events, even if they are not very well attended now. It is in our interest to offer a variety of events in different time slots. The attendance will come. And remember that we do differentiate between those tutors who only host events, and the more experienced tutors who also correct writing and closely follow their learners.

Thank you for your support.

6

How do you differentiate between the two different types of tutors?

7

I think Tutors should have a little competence and security in the language they offer at first the members have to pay for. Not everybody could or should do this.

8

Helen,

When people start tutoring we usually ask them to only host discussions, and they are not on the list of tutors that people can select as their personal tutor. They do not correct writing. Once they have had sufficient experience as discussion hosts, they can then be made full fledged tutors, as is now the case with you.

The word tutor originally has the following meaning:

from Dictionary.com
1377, “guardian, custodian,” from O.Fr. tutour “guardian, private teacher,” from L. tutorem (nom. tutor) “guardian, watcher,” from tutus, variant pp. of tueri “watch over,” of unknown origin. Specific sense of “senior boy appointed to help a junior in his studies” is recorded from 1689. The verb is attested from 1592; tutorial (adj.) is recorded from 1742; as a noun it is attested from 1923.

Irene,

At LingQ tutors are not teachers, they are companions and helpers in the language learning journey of fellow members of LingQ. I do not believe that language learning is about teaching, it is about learning. That is at the core of the LingQ method. The tutor needs to be a motivator, and the learner, the language and our system will do the rest.

Our tutors are there to encourage, guide, help, provide feedback and stimulate. As long as a person is a native speaker, has a pleasant personality, speaks his/her own language well, and is familiar with LingQ, that is enough to fulfill the role of tutor.

We may even , in the future, allow non-native speakers to tutor absolute beginners in a language that they speak well.

9

Further on the subject of tutoring at LingQ, some of you may ask why we charge points for tutoring if our members are volunteering. Here is why.

We know that for continuity and reliability we need a core group of tutors who deserve to be paid. They put a lot of effort into their work. They are available for our learners, at discussions, correcting writing as quickly as possible, writing reports and caring for their learners.

By charging points we are assured that we can pay our core “professional” tutors.

We believe that our “volunteer” tutors will be a little more irregular, but that is also quite all right. We want our “events” page to be full of discussions so that different members interests and time zones can be accommodated. We do not have enough “professional” tutors to achieve this right now, yet we do not have sufficient demand to take on more “professional” tutors.

So we believe that we can have both, “volunteer” tutors who can earn points for their studies at LingQ, and “professional” tutors who can be relied on to be there in the long run. We do not want to charge less for the volunteers because that would adversely affect our regular tutoring program.

Of course people are free to set up language exchanges with each other directly, but we prefer to see this as part of regularly schedule events within LingQ, with people joining group discussions and getting to know each other.

I would welcome further questions on this subject,as this is an area that will be evolving over time.