Online Tutor Program Kicks Off

The Harvard Online Tutoring Project, a new student organization that offers online help in math, science, English and history to high school students, began offering its services yesterday in computer labs across the Boston Public Library system.

Group president and founder Thomas “Mackie” Dougherty ’03 said the program is the nation’s first community service group geared toward online tutoring, although for-profit organizations offer similar services.

High school students can log on to private Internet chat rooms for each subject and ask questions of the tutors, who are mostly Harvard undergraduates. Tutors can type answers or draw on a board that appears at the bottom of the chat screen to illustrate graphs or equations for math and science questions.

The organization is partnered with the Boston Public Library, which has advertised the online tutoring to high school students. Librarians at each branch have program accounts and can grant access to individual students, who are then able to log in from any computer with Internet access.

Although only two students in English and one student in history logged on to the program yesterday, Dougherty attributed the lower-than-expected numbers to confusion among librarians.

One student yesterday posted a college admissions essay to the site’s English bulletin board and discussed it for 40 minutes with tutor Caitlin Lowans, a senior at Georgetown University who is currently the only non-Harvard tutor in the program.

Dougherty said he was contacting other Boston-area colleges to expand the tutor base, which currently numbers about 30.

The bulletin board is checked about twice per day, so students can post essays and questions outside of the program’s regular hours. Tutors are currently online from 3 to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday.

The project aims to serve as both a “primary means of communication” through its own online tutoring and as a “secondary” means by allowing current face-to-face Harvard tutoring programs to offer students supplemental help online, Dougherty said.

Dougherty said personal contact might make tutoring more effective, but added that online help can reach more students by eliminating the problem of transportation and easing the necessity for large time commitments.

Tutors, in turn, will be able to answer students’ questions from their dorm rooms.

While she tutored students in person during high school, Abigail T. Berman ’05 said the online medium allows her to reach more people without sacrificing a personal connection.

“Even though you’re not sitting with them, you can explain things,” said Berman, the group’s co-director of tutoring and membership. “You can maintain some personal level.”

Tutors may also organize optional events such as barbecues to meet the high school students they help online, Dougherty said.

The program targets high school students because of their computer skills and ability to focus on their own, Dougherty said.

“The things they’re learning are of a sufficiently abstract nature that it works over this medium,” he said.

Although only Boston public school students can currently participate in the program, organizers said they hope to include more areas and schools depending on demand.

“We’re definitely thinking of expanding beyond Boston, but that’s way in the future,” Berman said. “We need to make sure there are plenty of people watching over [current students].”

Dougherty said he has also tried to recruit individual Boston high schools rather than relying on the library system to advertise to students, but has met with success only at a public charter school.

“We’ve called many schools many times but haven’t been able to make much headway because people are too busy,” he said. “We have not had negative response.”

Dougherty has been working on software code for the tutoring project since last December and began talking to librarians and recruiting tutors at the beginning of the school year.

He wrote about one-third of the code and took the rest from publically available open-source software. Dougherty used money from his summer job to pay for the project’s server, housed in Maxwell Dworkin.

Although expenses have been minimal, tutors will ask technology-oriented non-profit groups and technology companies to donate money to offset hardware and operating costs, Dougherty said.