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On-Line Company Plans 24-Hour Tutoring Service for Undergraduates

By: Sarah Carr
The Chronicle of Higher Education

December 3, 1999 --Thousands of students take courses on line, buy textbooks on line, and find dates on line. Now a new company hopes that they will look for tutors on line as well. Organizers of the company, Smarthinking, plan to provide 24-hour academic assistance to students taking popular undergraduate courses.

While some professors and administrators may roll their eyes and groan as the growth of the Internet spurs another commercial company to enter the higher-education marketplace, a few colleges are already planning to try out Smarthinking's offerings. They say the service will be a useful addition to their existing tutoring programs.

Burck Smith, a co-founder of the company, says it will test its product in January, offering free math tutoring and a free on-line writing laboratory at 5 to 10 colleges, although eventually either the institution or individual users would be expected to pay for the service. The estimated cost for institutions would be $30 to $45 per student per semester. Northern Virginia Community College and Mountain Empire Community College are among the institutions that are likely to participate in the test.

If the trial goes well, Smarthinking will expand to other core subjects, including Spanish, U.S. history, and biology. Eventually, Mr. Smith says, the company will offer scheduled personal assistance in an expanded range of subject areas, drop-in study sessions that will be available 24 hours a day, and lists of self-help resources, such as on-line textbooks.

"We see this as a supplemental service," Mr. Smith says. "We do not want to grant degrees; we do not want to compete with institutions. Smarthinking will serve as an overlay on top of the existing institutional structure."

He believes that the growth of distance-education programs and the proliferation of for-profit colleges have led to increased competition among traditional colleges, which have been prompted to look for ways to bolster their services and improve their appeal to students.

"We are taking academic support to a scale that a traditional institution simply cannot," he says. "There is no school that I know of that has the ability to provide tutorial help at 2 a.m."

Although Smarthinking is at least a few weeks away from helping its first student, it has already sparked a debate among some professors and administrators.

Kurt Bouman, director of the learning-resource center at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, says he might consider using Smarthinking as an adjunct to the university's existing services, but he worries that some students or administrators might see it as a replacement for campus-based tutoring.

"I think on-line tutoring can provide content-area reinforcement, but the reasons students seek tutoring go beyond that," Mr. Bouman says. "And I believe most students won't benefit from it. The pool of students interested in the idea will be larger than the pool for whom it would be effective." He says some students have "local" problems that are specific to their institutions, for instance.

Others say the service would not eclipse on-site workshops and academic-assistance programs. Robert A. Ross, director of student academic services at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, notes that since a centralized learning-assistance center was opened on his campus two years ago, the demand for its services has been so great and the room for expansion so limited that the university is considering alternatives.

"With distance education on the forefront for all of us, we believe that this could supplement our existing services," Mr. Ross says of Smarthinking. "But our intent would not be to replace what we are currently doing."

Lynnell Edwards, an associate professor of English and director of the writing center at Concordia University, in Portland, Ore., says she is concerned not by the prospect of on-line tutoring, but by Smarthinking's being a business. The profit motive might change the relationship between student and tutor, she warns.

"Smarthinking never wants to hear that a consumer doesn't need the product," she says. "They have to continue to generate a demand for their product, and I wonder how this will happen."

Many educators have a "knee-jerk reaction" to the idea of a commercial company's supplying tutors, Smarthinking's Mr. Smith says. "It definitely is generating some controversy around the role of the for-profit and the non-profit in education. But the actual question should be about the types and quality of the service and the costs."

(Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education)