Education Policy, Business and Technology

24/7 Help for the Online Student

Campus Technology: Tutoring for online learners is a tricky business. Even the best-staffed brick-and-mortar tutoring center would be hard-pressed to overcome the time zone challenges presented by students hailing from all over the world. CT spoke with two institutions — the Ivy Tech Community College System (IN) and Pennsylvania State University World Campus — that turned to a third-party, 24/7 online tutoring service to help bridge that gap.

The schools are both similar and different. In a presentation during the OLC Accelerate conference last year, Stacy Atkinson, a project manager for strategic initiatives at Ivy Tech, reported that her 31-campus community college system has 14,000 "exclusively online" students. They tend to be working students based primarily in-state; 70 percent of them attend college part-time and are of "traditional" college age. Penn State's World Campus, which is entirely online, has a similar number of online degree students (15,000), but they come from 60 different countries and tend to be adult learners — mostly over 30 years old and attending part-time.

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