22nd April 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I was back to some kind of normality last week, and was able to do more work on the online tuition pages. We’re redesigning the way that the chat windows work, so that tutors and students have a central area where they can text chat before starting a lesson. Previously, each chat window was going to be in a different browser tab, but we were having trouble working out a nice way to make that work for tutors. Instead, we’re going with a system where tutors will be alerted that a student wants to speak with them, whatever Blue Tutors page the tutor is currently looking at, and can then navigate to a page showing the all the ‘open’ chats the tutor has. Not easy, and lots of annoying Javascript, but kind of nice because I hadn’t done anything like that for a few weeks.
I also reviewed the exercises from the tutoring course last week (there are a few exercises that tutors are asked to complete, and then discuss the results in pairs), and noticed a bit of a problem; in a few cases, people had made mistakes which were not corrected by their partner. I suspect that this was mainly because everyone was nervous about telling a stranger about a mistake, but that is a problem; I don’t want anyone walking away having misunderstood the ideas. The solution is for me to ask people to read out what they have done once the exercise has been completed, but that adds more time onto a course which really needs shortening!