HCC’s Online Tutoring Program:Improving Student Success

1. HCC’s Online Tutoring Program:
Improving Student Success
Stephen Levey, Ed.D.
Associate Vice Chancellor, Academic Instruction
Deborah Hardwick
Manager, Online Tutoring

2. About Houston Community College . . .
• Educates more than 75,000 students per semester
• 1st for international student enrollment among U.S. community
colleges
• Highly diverse student population:
% Student Demographics by Ethnicity
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Afr-Amer Hispanic Asian White Other
1

3. What Were We Looking to Do?
Use Online Tutoring
to Increase:
Access Success
2

4. Use Technology. Don’t Let it Use You!
“While technology is not a
panacea, it must be an
integral part of any
redesign focused on
increased completion.”
Nodine, T., Venezia, A., and
Bracco, K. (2011) Changing Course:
A Guide to Increasing Student
Completion in Community Colleges
3

5. Operational Procedures Loop
Develop a plan to implement
service and measure the impact of
online tutoring on student success.
Implement service Implement
and conduct improvements,
quantitative conduct additional
research. research.
Assess results of
the program.
4

6. Research Findings
• 937 tutoring sessions (units)
observed
• For every one-unit increase in
tutoring usage per
semester, student GPA increased
by approximately .05 points.
• Among all students observed:
GPA
Service Users 2.915
Non-Users 2.685
5

7. Future Recommendations
for Research
Track
Increased
Demographic
Outreach
Groups
Future
Research
Study Effect on
Track Subject
Retention and
Areas
Completion
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8. Summary
Online Tutoring:
• Addresses two of the primary commitments/tenets of the
community college – increased access and student success
• Addresses a large, diverse student population
• Uses technology instead of letting technology use us
• Implements the HCC institutional effectiveness model
• Uses research to validate effectiveness of the service and
plan for the future
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9. And so it began …
• 2003 - Northwest College and Distance
Ed began using an external online
tutoring service.
• April, 2006 - The Academic
Dean, Southwest College, asked
English tutoring supervisor to
investigate doing the same.
• April, 2006 – Meeting held with Tutors
“R” Us sales rep and several English
teachers. Problems with oversight
uncovered. “Why can’t we do it
ourselves?”
• Sept. 11, 2006 – We went live.
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10. Understanding HCC
To understand the complexity we had to
overcome in order to develop our online
tutoring program,
it is necessary to visualize the organizational
structure of the institution.
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11. Basic Numbers
In September 2006, it took us 11 days to receive 100 papers.
Today, we average about 100 submissions per day.
Since September 11, 2006 …
• 29,448 students have registered and used the system.
• Tutors have worked 34,865 hours.
• Tutors have responded to 63,226 student submissions.
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12. Challenges
1. Money
2. Territoriality
3. Supervision
4. 14 different schedules at 14 tutoring centers
5. 5 different organizational modes
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13. Challenges (continued)
6. Varying skill sets from tutors
7. Varying levels of supervision and oversight
8. No coordination among programs
9. Minimal record keeping
10. To get started, we had to get the support of…
Five academic deans,
Five workforce deans,
Five student service deans,
Five presidents,
Five English department chairs, and
Five English tutoring supervisors.
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14. Our Pre-Launch Goals
• Make English tutoring available
all the time to everyone.
• Increase student’s skills and
comfort levels.
• Save overhead and increase
efficiency, thus making more
money available for tutor
salaries.
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15. Critical Decisions
Technology
We choose to work with
Askonline.net, a company that only
provides tutoring support technology. It
offers a variety of
formats, archiving, reporting and tech
support. We look at Askonline as a
partner, not just a vendor.
Content (Tutors)
We choose to hire current and recent ex-
HCC faculty as tutors.
Marketing
We choose to market ourselves very
aggressively among all our constituent
groups. 14

16. Our Constituents
Students
Faculty
HCC in General
The Online Tutoring Profession
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17. Money Matters
When all the costs are added up…
Self-staffed online tutoring costs
less than externally-staffed for-hire
companies, and the non-monetary
rewards are so much greater.
As a result of our increasing
efficiency and knowledge…
Our per-contact costs have fallen
from $12.65 / contact in fiscal
2008/2009 to $10.23 today.
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18. Find-a-Tutor
The Chancellor’s Innovation Fund
provided a small grant so we could develop
a searchable database of all tutoring at HCC.
(Screenshots of Find-a-Tutor can be found in your packets.)
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19. The Tutoring Toolbar
We developed a toolbar that allows for consistency and
speed in commenting on papers.
We share this toolbar with faculty at HCC and schools
around the country that use self-staffed online tutoring.
(The toolbar and an explanation of the buttons can be found in your packet.)
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20. Summary
Managed appropriately, online tutoring is an
economical, efficient, personal and professional answer to
student needs,
and it works!
Online tutoring is the future! 19