Tutortrac Review

As you might guess, Tutortrac has many advantages over manually collecting student data. These benefits can be encapsulated into the fact that collecting and analyzing information is now less onerous. Tutortrac even collects more specific information than did the in-house program that we commissioned specifically for us. I haven’t done an extensive comparison but it seems that Tutortrac even has a better scheduling interface than does Accutrack. If you’re running a tutoring center, these two programs are the only viable options other than to build your own. This is an unfortunate situation as such a tiny market does not drive innovation nor punish mediocrity.

We use Tutortrac to create individual and group tutoring sessions. The individual appointment function works fine. The group appointment function requires compromises that goes against sound pedagogy and commonsense. I’ll explain by first describing our course code, XX-XXX-XXX-XX. The first two numbers is the school. The second three numbers is the subject. The next three numbers is the course and the last two numbers is the section. If we use this course code and a wildcard symbol “@” specific to Tutortrac, we can assign a subject to an individual or group session, thereby allowing certain students to sign up to a session while disallowing others from doing so.

For example, we can assign 21@ to a group session which means that students from school 21 taking any course can sign up for a session with a tutor who has been assigned that specialty. Of course, this would not be a workable assignment as we’ve cast our net too wide, so let’s continue. We can add a subject to the assignment 21_640@ meaning that students from school 21 taking a math course can sign up for a session. This also is unworkable as our net is still too wide. To continue, we can assign 21_640_119@ to a session, effectively excluding all students excepting those from school 21 taking Basic Calculus. We could continue by adding the section number, effectively limiting the session to students taking a specific course. This process of assigning subjects to groups seems to work well in principle but quickly breaks down in practice.

The problem arises when we realized that before we began using Tutortrac we would assign students in ways that the above procedure doesn’t allow. Several of our courses don’t command enough traffic to justify hiring a tutor for just that course, so to compensate we create groups of similar enough courses. Moreover, we also combine like courses because we believe students benefit from engaging with their peers who are studying similar material, for instance, Basic Calculus and Calculus I. But because Tutortrac allows sign-ups based upon only one course code per session, assigning groups in this way is no longer possible.

Effectively, courses that are essentially the same except for some differences in course code cannot be assigned to a single group. For instance, two students taking Basic Calculus one from our undergraduate college and the other from our adult college cannot be assigned to the same group session because their courses have a different school codes. To compensate, Tutortrac allows for two special classes of subjects designated by “@” and “*” that aren’t very feasible themselves. The best available solution for us is to assign “@” to most group tutoring sessions, which limits the session to only and all subjects in which the tutor specializes. If a tutor specializes in wildly disparate subjects then we either have to accommodate ourselves to strange combinations of subjects or remove some of a tutor’s specialties, a decision which has important drawbacks.

Our inability to assign courses in the manner that we decide affects us in important ways. We cannot assign tutors as efficiently as we have done in the past and students cannot be grouped based on sound educational principles and practices. Students notice these things. Here’s an example of a comment that we collected last semester, “It is better if all Basic Calc was together, all Calc I is together and Calc II, because that way students can help one another as well as tutor and you will get help the whole session.” Not only does this make sense, it makes commonsense. Our tutors also feel that this assignment issue makes their jobs more difficult.

To be fair, RedRock Software has made several requested modifications to the program. This one seems to require more effort than they are willing to commit so they have determined that this is not on the shortlist of things they wish to do at this time.

This decision is a shame as assigning students to groups is so fundamental to the work of a learning center that this ability should have been among the essential features of version 1.0 rather than a possible add-on to be completed some time in the future…maybe.

This interview with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark describes the relationship between the Craigslist site and its users. I’ll leave you to determine its relevance to this post. Via Mark Evans Blog.

No related posts.