8th May 2015 1:00
By Blue Tutors
Having been a tutor for the best part of eight years, I make an effort – as all tutors should – to keep up with changes in education and education technology. In recent years these changes have been substantial. Since the introduction of AS levels, both GCSEs and A levels have been under constant scrutiny and subject to various changes. Many have said there are too many exams, others have said that coursework needs to be reduced in favour of exams. The last education secretary said that we should be promoting British literature, and the new education secretary has emphasised the importance of students learning technology and IT skills from an early age, including programming. Whilst tutors need to keep up with these changes, how do we deal with the advent of new policies and technologies with respect to our tutoring methods?
One of the biggest changes technology has made to tutoring is the ability to tutor online using programmes such as Skype, face time and blackboard. There are now programmes which allow us to give face to face lessons online, and to post lectures, notes and homework in an online repository which our students can access at their convenience. These technologies can be extremely useful, providing a means for us to support our students when we cannot be there in person, and updating notes for them after our lessons. However, I have also observed that with the advent of these technologies has come a different attitude towards tutoring from both tutors and students, informed by a reliance on technology which I find troubling. To be clear, I am not advocating that we eschew the benefits of these technologies, and especially for the dubious purposes of adhering to traditional teaching methods. I am suggesting that while we make use of these technologies, it would be prudent to curb reliance on them which often happens at the expense of students achieving deeper understanding of their subjects.
So, what is the difference between using these technologies helpfully, and in ways which are detrimental? A problem that I am seeing more and more often is that parents and students often assume that using technologies is necessarily better. Of course sometimes it is, particularly when tutors cannot be there in person for whatever reason. But increasingly, students are disappointed if tutors have not selected and posted the necessary sections of reading online, or want to arrange lessons over skype at short notice rather than arranging face to face lessons in advance.
The downside of these technologies is that they make it easier for students to deprioritise their lessons and the amount of work that they put in. It is obviously good to make texts available to students, but spoon-feeding them the exact excerpts they will need deprives them of the understanding they would gain from conducting the research themselves. Similarly, having tutors available online at a moment’s notice does not encourage students to plan ahead and leave time for their studies. Whilst technologies such as online source repositories and Skype can be immensely useful, we should allow our students to become reliant on them.