ON-LINE TUTORING: UAF'S VIRTUAL WRITING CENTER

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 17, 1997
(news feature by UAF graduate student Ryan Johnson)

Fairbanks, Alaska — The frozen forests and frostbitten tundra of the Alaskan Bush can be a tough place to get an education, but hundreds of students in remote regions of the state are determined to get a college degree regardless. For students in Fairbanks, a trained team of tutors in the university's Writing Center are readily available, but for students at one of the University of Alaska Fairbanks' branch campuses the story's a little different. With a fax deadline for a paper in three days, rural students can feel as if they're at an immense disadvantage, but today, with the help of internet conferencing technology, Bush students are a jingle of the modem away from the same assistance. Yet as with every technological innovation, the road to "real time" tutoring was a rocky, frustrating journey fret with crashing servers, vanishing files, jaw clenching technophobia and rampant miscommunication.

Enter Jamie Thurber, a tutor and graduate student in the creative writing department and Jeff McAllister, an undergraduate studying computer science. The two UAF students knew there had to be a better way. Up to that point, distance tutoring had been conducted via fax machine and telephone. Other than costing nearly $2000 a year in long distance bills, the method was flawed by inefficiency. Time was wasted just trying to orient tutor and student on the same page.

"It was like, 'let's look at page 4, paragraph 2, sentence 3'. No- no-,the one that begins with 'Over 40 million'. The second paragraph. OK, you're right. The first full paragraph, but the second paragraph on the page," Thurber recalls. "We asked ourselves how can we get real time, synchronous tutoring for these people? We needed to develop a way of tutoring that duplicated the face to face experience in the Writing Center."

The first step was initiated by Susan Blalock, a UAF professor who as the Writing Center Director had also financed and started the fax tutoring program years earlier. She asked Pete Pinney, a college composition professor to volunteer his class to experiment with "file transfer protocol," a process suggested by McAllister. The students would upload their papers electronically onto the university's mainframe. The Writing Center tutor would then download it, make comments and suggestions and then load it back up. "Immediately, we ran into problems," Thurber said. "Students copied old files over new or we'd crash the server. It was really time intensive. The tutors would spend two or three hours on each paper. It was frustrating." But it was a step in the right direction.

Then McAllister, the student computer scientist, began to explore the possibility of "chat room" tutoring. It was possible to bring up the student's text on screen at either end and simultaneously discuss it by means of typed messages in the "chat" program. Another step in the right direction, but Thurber wanted text capabilities and vocal capabilities. "I wanted the student to feel as if the tutor were sitting right beside them," Thurber said.

It was while "mucking about" on the internet that Thurber found what he was looking for; a "freeware" program dubbed Microsoft NetMeeting designed to bring global corporate offices together in a common workplace. Several people can collaborate in real time and each can manipulate the text on the screen. Everyone is within earshot with the help of what Thurber calls "Madonna" headsets because of their resemblance to the singer's microphone and headphone unit. Best of all, other than internet access costs, it doesn't cost a dime to communicate by modem or ethernet connection.

With help from Pinney's composition class, Thurber and McAllister began experimenting. They found that the software allowed them to open a Microsoft Word document and collaborate on it.

"Jeff could take over the control of the document by clicking the mouse, and I could take it back by clicking mine. We could each write on the document, highlight text, and scroll to different areas - we each had the same view and could operate all the program's functions while talking with each other."

All of these small steps in the right direction were paying off. Now it was time to head out into the Bush, set up terminals with the NetMeeting software and introduce the technology to the program directors and students. This year, with help from a $63,000 UA President's Reallocation Grant, Thurber and a new graduate student, Tom Porter, have gotten sites in Dutch Harbor, Dillingham and Galena up and running. The set-up process requires Thurber and Porter to install the computer, access an internet provider, dial in the internet access and then test the system. They also train students on-site, try to increase awareness of the program and generally help students overcome potential technophobia.

"The program is still in its formative stages," Thurber explains, "It's going to take awhile for the students to become comfortable with the technology."

Nonetheless, the Writing Center began tutoring its first rural students with NetMeeting in November and under Blalock's direction it has been considered a success. Although she is quick to point out that there have been "other folks doing a lot and for longer," she describes Thurber and McAllister as "inspirations for combining collaborative teaching and technology in Alaska."

Blalock and Thurber have authored two federal grant proposals with hopes of getting sites in Bethel, Barrow, Nome and McGrath up and running in the near future. A proposed set-up package would include a tutorial video, a headset, a soundcard, a technical manual and a CD-ROM encoded with an automatic start-up program for NetMeeting.

Any village with a low-end computer, students and access to the internet could receive this package in the mail, become acquainted with the process and technology, load the program from the CD-ROM and then simply dial-up the Writing Center.

Thurber has found himself on the cutting edge of distance education. He'll present his paper, "Synchronous Internet Tutoring: Bridging the Gap in Distance Education," at the upcoming Modern Language Association conference in Toronto and he will see a second paper, "Synchronous Audiovisual Internet Tutoring," published in an anthology devoted to writing centers.

Thurber sees the technology going far beyond editing papers. "It will enhance the rural village's sense of community and help bring their classrooms together."

Regardless of how many hundreds of arctic miles.

CONTACT: Ryan Johnson is a graduate student in the UAF creative writing department and a media assistant at University Relations. For more information call (907) 474-7778.

RMJ/12-17-97/98-027