Lions and Tigers and Elephants, (&) Oh Deer!

I’m in India – Two flights, 8500 miles and twenty-two plus hours and here I am. It’s my third trip. I feel I’m a pretty seasoned India traveler. For example, I know to put mosquito repellent on before I step off the plane. It’s past midnight so the repellant is designed to keep away the malaria-carrying night-time mosquitoes vs. the mosquitoes during the day that carry dengue fever.

One can take anti-malaria medicine in case some of the night-time mosquitoes find their mark despite the repellent. There isn’t an anti-dengue medicine as far as I know. I do know something about dengue fever, though. My father was an army doctor stationed near Pearl Harbor in Hawaii during WWII and was tasked with figuring out where and how soldiers were contracting an awful hemorrhagic fever (now known as dengue). He got out a map of Oahu and charted the route of soldiers who came down with dengue. He figured out most of them waited at one of the bus stops on the island near standing water. My father surmised mosquitoes were to blame and ordered all standing water drained out from flower pots, puddles on the ground, etc. The army was able to stave off the dengue-carrying daytime mosquitoes and hence the disease.

With mosquito repellant applied, I exit the plane and my India adventure resumes.

After a week of meetings and tutor-business stuff, I had the pleasure to travel with TutorVista CEO Ganesh and his family to the mountains of Coonoor, around 300 km from Bangalore. To get there we drove through Bannerghatta National Park that has lions, tigers, monkeys, deer, elephant, and panthers.

http://www.indiantigers.com/bannerghata-national-park.html

Thirty-six hairpin turns up the mountain (each numbered and labeled), we visit a wonderful town with a temple elephant decorated trunk to tail and flower-covered float.

http://www.hindu.com/2007/12/16/stories/2007121653390300.htm

Finally we end up in Conoor. It’s a nice hill stations in the mountains at an elevation of 1,800 meters known for its tea plantations.

http://www.coonoor.com/about.htm

It’s remarkable but even in this quaint town in the mountains past the lions, tigers, elephants and monkeys we have a TutorVista tutor! He tutors students who live 8,500 miles and 300 km away from the comfort and convenience of his home. This truly is a flat world!

John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com

Safe Tutoring

Child safety is a serious matter. The news frequently reports about teachers and others in authority who violate trust and act inappropriately with the children they are supposed to shepherd. Parents rely on coaches, teachers, tutors, and others to help guide and develop their kids.

But in today’s computer and internet world, how safe is your child if he or she works with an online tutor? We all know that on-line tutoring is very convenient. Mom and dad don’t have to drive the student to a tutor’s home or a business location. Students can go home after school and log in for their on-line tutoring session and no tutor physically comes to the house. But despite its convenience, is it safe? How do we ensure students are safe and secure while doing on-line tutoring?

There are ways to ensure child safety in an on-line tutoring environment:

1. On-line tutoring means your child is not physically with the tutor. Student and tutor are separated by distances as much as half-a-world away. For a tutor in India, it could cost a year’s salary for the tutor to fly where the student is or for the student to make the trip to India. And tourist visa’s and passports are required. This physical separation is a benefit for child safety.
2. Use steadily employed tutors rather than a tutor exchange or independent contractors. Avoid situations where predators can be connected with kids online under the guise of tutoring the way some predators hang out in chat rooms. Don’t use a tutoring exchange that lets anyone off the street post an ad and connect with kids.
3. Ensure your online tutor has passed a certification course that includes child protection.
4. Verify your online tutor’s qualifications and ensure he or she has had a professional, educational and personal background check.
5. Monitor student-tutor exchanges. Forbid your child from engaging in any student-tutor communications outside a tutoring session and monitor that communication in real time or through recordings. At TutorVista, students and tutors are required to interact with one another only during tutoring sessions and using our service delivery platform. Tutors understand this policy (it’s part of our certification process) and know too that violation of this policy will result in immediate dismissal.
6. Be involved in your child’s education – in school and online

Students using online tutoring can get safe, secure and protected educational help in a way face-to-face tutoring may not even support.

John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com

Tell Me What You Want, What You Really Really Want

Last week I attended the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum with hundreds of education technology & services providers, funders, marketers, biz-dev people and press. In a keynote speech, Dr. Thomas Houlihan from the Institute for Breakthrough Performance described problems in education as “systems” problems that can’t be solved with a band-aid or one-dimensional change. He also invoked the attendees to take a leadership role.

In another session a panelist remarked that education products and services providers need to ask school administrators and teachers for direction – what do they want? He suggested we build what people ask for…that they know best.

Like “It takes a village to raise a child,” I believe it takes a system to teach a child. Problems with school program implementation are often systems problems. This system includes teachers, books, assessments, policy, administration – all pieces working in concert together. Changing one part of the mix almost never significantly changes the system.

So back to the panelist’s recommendation – should we defer and ask teachers and administrators what they want? Do they know best?

I don’t think so. If you look at all the money that is spent on education, the value ascribed to it, and the tremendous number of vendors who are all too happy to create the products people have asked for, we would certainly by now have the products and services the industry really need if customers could describe what they wanted.

But innovation and major system change hasn’t happened yet. Not even from listening to what administrators and teachers want. We need to be guided by their dreams and the realities of today’s classroom and school and all the components that make up that system, but then we need to be leaders and invent something -- something exciting, fresh and better than what we have been using to date…what we “really, really want.” That’s the job for true industry leaders.
John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com

Using Tutoring To Increase Student Persistence & Graduation Rates

Many students drop out of community college and four year programs because they can't handle "gatekeeper" courses such as basic developmental math and writing. In a recent survey conducted by Communty College of Philadelphia, 20% of students dropped out for academic and program availability issues.

In this interview on the EDUInsight.com project web site, I address this drop out problem and how it negatively impacts students and educational institutions.

You can check out this interview at http://www.eduinsight.com/archive/john_stuppy.php

John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com

Just the Facts, Mann

My deep love for teaching and learning was sparked in large measure by good family friends, Bertha and Maurice Mann. They owned and ran the Hollywood Professional School in Hollywood, California. HPS is where Betty Grable, Ryan O’Neal, the Beach Boys, Jackson Five, Peggy Fleming, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Val Kilmer, Melanie Griffith, Valerie Bertinelli, most of the Brady Bunch kids and many other actors and athletes went to school. It provided the perfect schedule and flexibility for students who were working professionals.

Mrs. Mann let me attend summer school there as a child and I always looked forward to it. The classes were lively and interesting and Mrs. Mann had a passion for education. She gave me a lot of encouragement and support. I loved to learn and learn new ways to learn.

Mrs. Mann often shared learning techniques she came across at conferences. When I was seven she shared a new learning idea she heard about. It was a way to learn math facts – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The idea is students should just know that “3 x 7 = 21” or “11-4=7” rather than having to figure it out. Having math facts at the ready for rapid recall means students don’t have to waste time constantly calculating those basic things.

Mrs. Mann’s simple, effective technique? She gave me a couple dozen math facts flash cards. These were 8”x3” stiff cardboard cards with things like “2+9=11” and “7+8=15.” She had me tape them in strategic places around my room. I put one flash card on the headboard of my bed, the ceiling high above my pillow, wall by the light switch, wall above my desk, closet door, inside of my bedroom door, outside of my door, bathroom mirror over the sink, wall above the toilet, wall opposite the toilet, fridge door…everywhere. As I moved around my room each day, I saw these math facts. After a few days Mrs. Mann gave me new cards to replace the ones I had learned. Before long I knew all my math facts cold.

This learning method wasn’t high tech. But it was simple and it surely worked.

I still recommend Mrs. Mann’s “immersion” method for learning math facts today. While computers can display math facts flash cards and have some interesting features, they can’t be freely used everywhere a paper flash card can. Computerizing every education tool for the sake of computerizing them doesn’t make sense. Are there “back to basics” ways to learn we’ve lost sight of? Are there new types of manipulatives that bring concepts to life? Can we be more mindful of ways to leverage and stretch our resources and use the right tool for the job?

John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com

Same Race – Better Horse

At first, some innovations are not as cost-effective or fine-tuned as the products or services they replace. Clayton Christianson’s book The Innovators Dilemma pointed out that in the early stages, many innovations are a poor replacement. But then over time…that’s when some innovations shine. Christianson also pointed out that it’s often impossible for existing, entrenched companies to successfully launch innovations. They have too much invested and are set in their ways.

Take a look at online learning. Eleven years ago I started working with one-on-one on-line tutoring over the internet. The idea was a student and tutor would use their computer to talk and interact through a shared virtual whiteboard. At the time, the voice interaction was pretty crummy -- echoes, dropped calls, gaps and delays were common. It wasn’t a pleasant experience and this was despite the fact one had to pay more for the technology infrastructure.

However, look at where things have moved today. Now, the technology used for voice chatting over the internet and sharing a virtual whiteboard is a reliable commodity. It works! And students love the whole platform and thrive on the online experience.

But is it effective? That’s the big question, isn’t it? I did a study of over 500,000 K-12 students who were tutored in reading and math –face to face vs. on-line. The result? There was no difference in effectiveness gains as measured by pre-- vs. post-test growth on standardized tests between the two groups. .

So students getting tutoring via the internet achieved the same gains as those students going to a learning center and meeting with their tutor face to face. This is an encouraging finding for the education technology industry. It suggests you don’t have to sacrifice education results for convenience.

Online tutoring is more convenient and affordable and highly effective . The next stage in the evolution of the industry is to figure out how to take advantages of technology to increase the effectiveness beyond face-to-face tutoring. More on that in an upcoming blog.

Have you taken an online course? Was it engaging? What factors made it relevant and interesting? More or less effective?

John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com

The Butterfly Flapped Its Wings and Amazingly, Forty Years Later…

I went for a walk. And then I saw one…and then another…they were everywhere! Monarch butterflies were flitting and flying all around the neighborhood. There weren’t any there yesterday but now I could see at least 20.

Where did they come from? Did they just hatch?

I started thinking of the 8” think dictionary my family had at the top of the stairs in my house where I grew up, and the three feet of shelf space each that the Encyclopedia Britannica, World Book and Book of Knowledge took up in our family library. Forty years ago, I was equally curious then about how certain words should be spelled and where things like Monarch butterflies came from, but my intellectual pursuits back then usually followed this pattern…

“Mom…How do you spell 'mnemonic'?”

“Go look it up in the dictionary,” my mom would reply.

So I would trudge up the stairs, open the big book to “N” and look for “nemonic.” Of course the monstrous dictionary didn’t put a little red squiggle under the word when I looked it up in the wrong place, nor did it suggest “mnemonic.” If I didn’t find the word right away I was less likely to try and satisfy intellectual curiosity the next time.

Using the encyclopedias back then was usually more productive – assuming my brothers put back each of the volumes the last time they used them.

But this is 2007. While I walked, I pulled out my Treo phone, logged into Google, and searched for “Monarch Butterfly.”

Wow! While I was still walking among these little delicate creatures, I discovered:

* Monarch’s migrate as much as 3,000 miles flying South for Winter and North in the Spring
* They are poisonous snacks for predators and are brightly colored to make sure predators know they aren’t the yummy ones

So these butterflies didn’t just hatch today – they literally “blew into town” and miraculously, could travel many miles a day while seemingly flitting about.

What a great time we live in when we can easily learn things just in time and on the spot! To the three R’s standard when I grew up – Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic, we should add two more:
4. Reach – connecting with people through email & postings, and
5. Research – easy, fast, productive searches to a wealth of information and resources

Has your life changed with Reach and Research?

John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com