Tutor training across disciplines: expanding aid and enabling student entrepreneurship

As learning developers, we frequently find ourselves constrained by institutional structures and disciplinary areas of expertise. At just one of the University of Toronto’s three campuses, we have no fewer than five distinct undergraduate faculties, thereby creating a complex ecosystem that compounds the difficulty of supporting all students, even beyond the issue of understanding the expectations of multiple programs of study. While the Centre for Learning Strategy Support has dispersed members of our team across the St. George campus to focus on distinct student needs, varying funding and staffing structures has led to uneven support for our students in different disciplines, with many turning to external tutoring services of unreliable quality. While learning developers may be limited to their own education and experience, we are uniquely positioned as experts in teaching and learning: we may not always know the ins and outs of what students need to study, but we have valuable insights in how to do so. Over the past several years, we have built a curriculum of modules supporting effective and ethical peer-to-peer learning, based on strategies that are core to a learning developer’s work. Upon completing the University of Toronto Tutor Training Program, or UT3, and after securing the reference of a postsecondary subject matter expert, academically successful students are enabled to bring their discipline-specific knowledge to others as independent contractors on our Tutor Directory. With this combination of training and directory, we have built a new marketplace for all undergraduate students to find trustworthy tutors, and for our trainees to make money by supporting their peers. This presentation spotlighted the development and launch of the UT3, including the initial needs analysis and consultations, the creation of our curriculum, and our progress in training students to enable hundreds of tutoring sessions since our launch.