Overview | More Information – Features | Tutor Training | UN SDG 4

This is a Tutor Hub service, for more information about the Hub please visit our Tutor Hub Pages

Overview

One of the many challenges facing adult literacy learners is the sense of isolation that they can feel. This unique feature of the Tutor Hub service enables tutors to easily connect to their learners via the learner web app on their smartphones. The system is very simple to use – a tutor puts their tutor PIN number into their learner’s app and the name of the learner. After that the tutor can send text and voice messages to their learners as well as custom activities, just for those learners. This can make a huge difference in learner engagement and retention by making learners feel part of a community – from welcome messages – to change of class times – to encouragement to stick with the course – to asking learners to try the next custom activity. Tutors can manage their connected learners and put them into different cohorts for messages and custom activities.

More Information – Features

The App, Analytics, and Connected Learners(Forthcoming)
The learner app already captures detailed records of each learner’s interactions and progress (analytics) in order to give instant personalised feedback. This data is stored anonymously on our servers unless a learner is connected to a tutor via the Tutor Hub. In this scenario tutors and learning providers have access to the analytics for each connected learner. To make sense of this data it can be viewed via an analytics ‘dashboard’, at different levels of granularity, from an individual learner’s progress in a single app activity to a high-level summary of their progress over different periods of time. For learner cohorts, this data can also be viewed similar different ways.

This combination of the app, analytics, data dashboards, connected learners, messaging and custom activities provide a powerful set of tools to help tutors and learning providers support distance / independent learning amongst adult literacy learners – perhaps for the very first time.

Tutor Training

The features of this tool are new in adult literacy education and introduce and element of distance / open learning mediated by technology – perhaps for the first time in this sector. The fact that this is all capable of working on learners’ smartphones means they can feel a sense of being ‘connected’ to their tutors and their peers. For tutors, it also means they can consider what they want / need to do with these tools and modes of teaching. The combination of being able to send voice / text messages and custom word activities to their learners opens up many possibilities to explore. Starting simply and managing learner expectations is a good strategy and managing tutor time is important. The arrival of learner analytics information along the line we describe is very new (if not unique) in the field of adult literacy education. Learning to understand and act on learner analytics from the app will be a learning experience for us all. We can bring our own experience and critical evaluation of learner analytics based on our involvement with it in mainstream education. We expect future case studies to show how these tools are put to different uses in different contexts.

UN SDG 4

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Goal 4 Quality Education

“Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning

opportunities for all.”

The Citizen Literacy programme and its free learner web app is our contribution to meeting this goal and its target of achieving universal literacy.