Experienced and non-experienced e-tutors in Europe: Differences in supporting online collaboration.

In this study, we investigated differences between experienced and non-experienced European e-tutors in their support of online collaboration in practice. Therefore, we developed a questionnaire European e-tutors had to fill in to evaluate specific collaborative activities and to answer yes/no-questions regarding their intervention to support these collaborative activities. In respect of these collaborative activities, we distinguished between cognitive and social activities which are relevant for effective online collaboration. Overall, we received answers of 78 e-learning experiences from 17 different European countries. Cluster analysis was conducted to determine groups of e-tutors who answered similar regarding the response type across the various categories of support activities. To validate the cluster solution, we compared the resulting two clusters on the basis of the experience of e-tutors. The results indicate that e-tutors with experience evaluate relevant cognitive activities more important for collaboration than e-tutors without experience. Furthermore, e-tutors with experience intervene more often to foster cognitive and social activities. These findings show the importance of expertise in e-tutoring: It seems that e-tutors with experience consider the importance of specific cognitive activities for effective online collaboration and that they also are more familiar in detecting dysfunctional social phenomena and in adequately intervening to avoid such phenomena. Therefore, for daily practice it seems to be necessary to train e-tutors in sensitizing them to the problems and pitfalls of online collaboration so that they are able to detect such difficulties and to intervene in such a way that it supports group work.