eTutoring

Group may consist of enthusiastic learners who want to maximise communication channels, advance quickly in learning the content and contact eTutors and other group members frequently. Group may also have learners who may be overchallenged and are marked by either hesitation or disturbance. The following are diverse categories of learners that may be encountered in learning groups or communities:

• Hesitant: these learners are often silent watchers who remain in the background without any sign of participation. These learners may have no time to participate, lack necessary skills to participate or may be overchallenged by the course.
• Troublemakers: One or more learner may be interested in their own individual benefits than group benefits and be impatient, nervous and annoyed in groups.
• Overly-challenged learners: these learners need additional support on the content and personalised care. However, these learners can be self-confident after completing an online course.
• Under-challenged learners: these learners are advanced and expert in the content and some exercises may be boring to them. You may support these learners by providing additional knowledge and content and advise them on how they may work intensively with the additional content. You may also delegate some coordination responsibilities to them, which will reassure them that you value their knowledge and trust them to handle more responsible tasks.
• Over-enthusiastic learners: they invest too much time and effort in their study and are recognisable in the forum by their continuous and constant discussion. In some cases, you may want to hold them a little bit back so that they do not dominate the discussion and the course. 
• Ideal learners: practically rare to find, these learners cooperate in the entire course, have the right amount of enthusiasm, try to keep the group together, engage sufficiently with the content, react to all questions and request from an eTutor and are positively intrinsically motivated. These learners may be quite difficult to find in that every online learner needs some support from a tutor from time to time.

While the different types of online learners highlighted above may not be necessary found in all online courses, it is important for an eTutor to know different personality in their online courses and respond accordingly.

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