Ben Reynolds writes:

Our program is totally distance education, with no possibility of face-to-face interaction because our tutors and students are located all around the world (mostly U.S., but one tutor overseas and students on every continent). Although our program uses surface mail only, email only, and CDROM/email formats, I'm just going to talk about the CDROM/email format, which is a college-level frosh composition course, but pitched to verbally gifted junior and senior high school students (in 7th grade, they score as well on the SAT-Verbal as the average high school senior).

We've developed a mentor, or master tutor, situation, where experienced tutors guide new tutors through the technology and the administrivia of our program. The new tutors use a handbook written by the master tutors to help navigate through the tech & admin aspects. When new tutors have questions, they consult their master tutors.

Our ideal lead time for training is 2 weeks or more. Practically, it's been more like 1 week. Most of our new tutors seem to grasp the basics quickly (& we're talking some who use old Mac's and don't know much about courseware, etc.), mostly with consistent and frequent consults from their mentors. The mentors walk the newbies through the technology carefully.

Our goal in going online was to move away from a product-oriented pedagogy into something much more interactive. Our CDROM/email course is not just interactive w/ the CD or with the tutor but also includes a web-based workshop. For the first time, the students have a chance to interact with each other (vs. the surface and email only formats).

Going online w/ CD/email actually showed us possibilities that other formats of distance ed just don't provide. Interaction, mainly, but also that wonderful thing, an audience larger than the instructor. Our earlier and ongoing experiments with listservs have showed us that the kids workshop each other quite well, if the grown-ups stay out of the way.

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