I am not going to argue that tutorials are not an important part of Higher Education but much like their equivalent in the workplace, the performance review, they are (to my mind at least) pastoral than directly learning-related. Most tutorials will touch on learning, the course content and the student's progress and provide guidance for the student much as a performance review will look at an employees achievements and development goals and routes to achieve them. However, they are ancilliary to and not part of learning per se.
In the two papers we looked at in this activity, studies were made using surveys to look at performance of two flavours of a course, one where tutorial support was provided face to face (with additional phone/email contact) and the other online using audio conferencing etc. The studies seemed to conclude that the students' perceptions of academic quality of the courses did not vary significantly but that online tutoring was perceived to be poorer than face-to-face tutoring. Work therefore could be done on improving tutors' skills in online tutoring and students ability to fully exploit online communication tools.
To my view, online and face-to-face communication have both pros and cons and each have contexts where one is better suited than the other. If a student is feeling lost and isolated or confused then a face to face tutorial may provide batter pastoral support but if a student merely wants to question their tutor and get answers or talk through a discussion point then taking advantage of online communication to do that in a timely manner without travel may be more appropriate. The papers made no mention of what the purpose of the tutorials were or what the needs of the students were and without that information an assessment of relative quality is meaningless; it's a bit like saying apples are better than oranges.
My big issue with these activities was that we were looking at tutorials delivered both on and offline rather than the courses themselves being delivered by this different means. What I am interested in and what H800 purports to be about is online education, not online pastoral care. While these are not unrelated issues, I don't feel these studies did anything to address 'the choices that learners make about their own learning' or 'theories that practitioners draw on in the field of technology-enhanced learning' as stated in the learning outcomes because they did not look at learning in any meaningful way.
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References
Price, L., Richardson, J.T.E., Jelfs, A. (2007) 'Face-to-face versus online tutoring support in distance education' Open University, UK.
Richardson, J.T.E. (2009) 'Face to face versus online tutoring support in humanities courses in distance education' Open University, UK.