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- All Subjects: tutoring
- Creators: Ahmad, Altaf
Description
For students on a college campus, many courses can present challenges to them academically. Some universities have taken an initiative to respond to this by offering tutoring opportunities at a central location. Generally this provides help for some struggling students, but others are left with many questions unanswered. Two primary reasons for this are that some tutoring services are broad in scope and that there may not be sufficient one-on-one time with a tutor. With the development of a mobile application, a solution is possible to improve upon the tutoring experience for all students. The concept revolves around the formation of a labor market of freelancers, known as a gig economy, to create a large supply of tutors who can provide their services to a student looking for help in a specific course. A strategic process was followed to develop this mobile application, called Tuzee. To begin, an early concept and design was drafted to shape a clear vision statement and effective user experience. Planning and research followed, where technical requirements including an efficient database and integrated development environment were selected. After these prerequisites, the development stage of the application started and a working app produced. Subsequently, a business model was devised along with possible features to be added upon a successful launch. With a peer-to-peer approach powering the app, monitoring user engagement lies as a core principle for consistent growth. The vision statement will frequently be referred to: enhance university academics by enabling the interaction of students with each other.
ContributorsArcaro, Daniel James (Author) / Ahmad, Altaf (Thesis director) / Sopha, Matthew (Committee member) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / WPC Graduate Programs (Contributor) / Department of Management and Entrepreneurship (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The Barrett Poly Writing Colloquium is a dedicated group of students and faculty that come together to provide Freshmen in the Human Event with an impactful tutoring experience that enriches their Human Event papers and reading responses. There were, however, a few major issues with the way in which tutoring sessions were recorded, archived, and maintained. We set out to clean up the process and provide a more positive experience for all involved. Starting out, we searched to find a way to electronically archive tutoring receipts that students receive at the end of a tutoring session. In the beginning of the project, we were sporting experience with front-end coding languages such as HTML and CSS, with a minuscule amount of experience using JavaScript. By diving in and closing the gaps in our knowledge of JavaScript, we were able to build a web form that would suit the needs of the tutors and administrators, while still offering students the feedback that they needed to improve their writing, in a personal way that preserves the quality of the core service provided by the colloquium. Our primary objective was to build a system that moved the reporting of tutoring sessions online, while maintaining a way to generate a receipt for distribution to the students and tutors. We delivered on that, and then some, by building an automated system using Google's developer tools to automatically write all tutoring session data to a Google Sheet, and send an automated email with all relevant information to both the student and tutor. We then dedicated the time we had remaining to adding additional features. It is here that we began to run into problems that unfortunately proved to be technological constraints of the platforms we were developing on, and the languages we were using. By this point, it was too late for us to pivot, but we were still able to achieve many of our goals. For example, we successfully implemented a feature that automatically archives the entire year's worth of data and creates a new, clean Google Sheet at the beginning of each school year. If we were to continue our project, with more time, we would use different development tools and systems so that we could have more flexibility. However, using the Google API provided us with many benefits that allowed us to jump right in to building our program, without having to struggle with building a whole database with accounts and permissions.
ContributorsLiddle, Lucas (Co-author) / Fix, Nathan (Co-author) / Oberle, Eric (Thesis director) / Martin, Thomas (Committee member) / Kennedy, Chad (Committee member) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05