OTiS Project, Heriot-Watt University and Robert Gordon University
Abstract
This chapter addresses three questions about being an effective online tutor: 1. Why do we still think that online tutoring can principally draw its basis from face-to-face group processes and dynamics or traditional pedagogy? 2. Does the literature tell us anything more than we would make as an intelligent guess? 3. Do we really know what an ‘effective’ online tutor would be doing? The OTiS participants have gone some way to answering these questions, through the presentation and discussion of their own online tutoring experiences. Literature in this area is still limited, and suffers from the need for timeliness of publication to be useful. Intelligent guesses are all very well, but much better as a source of information for online tutors are the reflections and documented experiences of practitioners. These experiences reveal that face-to-face pedagogy has some elements to offer the online tutor, but that there are key differences and there is a need to examine the processes and dynamics of online learning to inform online tutoring
