Monitoring System

How the Tutor is held responsible

One of the essential elements to ensure good quality of tutoring is to keep close contacts between three parties: the course professor, the tutors, and the students. CU's tutors are the direct interface between CU and the students. In order to ensure the quality of our delivery system, the performance of the tutors will need to be closely monitored. At CU, the monitoring role rests with the individual course professors who follow the Institute's guidelines.

Measuring Performance

There are various ways to measure the performance of the tutors and these can be briefly described as follows:

• The turnaround time of tutor marking, the quality of marking and the comments on the written assignments will be a measurable indication of the integrity of the tutors.
• The numbers attending tutorials may reflect how well the tutors have been accepted by the students. The course professor should obtain feedback from tutorials on a regular basis in order to obtain feedback from the students' on the tutors and, whenever possible, to personally gauge the quality of the tutorials.
• The comments from assignments submitted and the test results may also serve as an indicator on the progress of the students and the amount and quality of assistance given to them by the tutors.
• The students' dropout rates of certain tutors can also explain the extent of encouragement given to the students by the tutors. If tutors are constantly in touch with the students, the dropout rates can be greatly reduced.

It is important to note that the purpose of monitoring is not only to serves as a quality control mechanism, but it also serves to expedite immediate and remedial action to problems areas, as required. The purpose of monitoring is therefore a process of standardisation and feedback on the performance of the tutors.

Monitoring Process

By monitoring the assessment process and checking the database, course professors can ensure that all students are receiving sufficient amount of tutor feedback. If tutors are found to be giving significantly less feedback, they are advised accordingly. Course professors can pick up severe or lenient markers from monitoring the marking of assessment activities. Another method of ensuring the students receive fair marks is to look at the distribution of marks for each tutor on the database. The data will show if any tutor has been giving exceptionally high or low marks, or if the distribution of marks is uneven.

Visits

As part of their job, centre managers may visit study groups from time to time in order to have first hand experience and feeling about the conduct of the tutors and reactions from students. These visits are not considered top priority and are informal in nature.

Comments from Tutors

As no formal performance appraisal system for tutors is in place, the centre manager can have a interview with the tutor, which may give some indication about the tutor's ability to handle students, his/her attitude toward the way the education was delivered and his/her maturity in dealing with adult students. This informal appraisal meeting serves to identify problems and difficulties the tutor may have and for the centre manager to give advice and encourage the tutor to be committed for future appointments.

Students' Comments about Tutors

Feedback from students, by means of questionnaires and informal discussions, is an effective way to monitor the performance of tutors. Some CU course professors design their own questionnaires for students to give their feedback about their tutors as well as their experience with the course as a whole, the delivery, and the support they receive from the Institute.

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