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A busyness model for assigning tutors to pupils in a mobile, online tutoring system: a look at C³TO

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SAICSIT '10: Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists

Pages 350 - 355

https://doi.org/10.1145/1899503.1899543

Published: 11 October 2010 Publication History

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Abstract

What constitutes busyness? When is a person busy? When is one person busier than another person? These are questions that C³TO attempts to answer when assigning tutors to pupils in a mobile, online tutoring environment. C³TO (Chatter Call Centre/Tutoring Online) is a platform which allows school pupils to use Mxit or any XMPP chat protocol on their cell phones to reach tutors for assistance with school homework problems. "Dr Math" is one of the services hosted on C³TO where primary and secondary school pupils link up with university students for help with their mathematics homework.

From ongoing experience, it has been found that a mathematics tutor can handle at most 50 pupils per hour using C³TO. The platform supports tutors connecting via the Internet using traditional workstations while pupils connect using GPRS or 3G using a chat protocol on their cell phones. Because there are always substantially more pupils needing help with mathematics homework than there are available tutors, a busyness model needed to be developed so that new pupils asking questions could be assigned to the least busy tutor in order to share the tutoring load equitably among the tutors currently online.

This paper discusses the original busyness model which was implemented during prior versions of "Dr Math" and the problems which it encountered. The paper will then describe the current busyness model and how it is implemented in C3TO.

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Cited By

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Haskins BBotha R(2017)Aligning mathematics with tutoring platform topicsThe Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa10.4102/td.v13i1.42813:1Online publication date: 8-Aug-2017
https://doi.org/10.4102/td.v13i1.428
Haskins BBotha R(2014)A mixed-method approach to normalising Dr. Math microtext2014 International Conference on Computational Science and Technology (ICCST)10.1109/ICCST.2014.7045182(1-6)Online publication date: Aug-2014
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCST.2014.7045182
Butgereit LBotha R(2013)An architecture for synchronous micro-volunteering in Africa using social media2013 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOM Workshops)10.1109/PerComW.2013.6529477(175-180)Online publication date: Mar-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/PerComW.2013.6529477

Index Terms

A busyness model for assigning tutors to pupils in a mobile, online tutoring system: a look at C³TO
1. Theory of computation
  1. Design and analysis of algorithms

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Published In

SAICSIT '10: Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists

October 2010

447 pages

ISBN:9781605589503

DOI:10.1145/1899503

Conference Chair:
Paula Kotzé
CSIR Meraka Institute, Pretoria, South Africa
,
Program Chairs:
Alta van der Merwe
CSIR Meraka Institute, Pretoria, South Africa
,
Aurona Gerber
CSIR Meraka Institute, Pretoria, South Africa

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 11 October 2010

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ACM
CSIR
Microsoft
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SAICSIT
Telkom

SAICSIT '10: 2010 Annual Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists

October 11 - 13, 2010

Bela Bela, South Africa

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Haskins BBotha R(2017)Aligning mathematics with tutoring platform topicsThe Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa10.4102/td.v13i1.42813:1Online publication date: 8-Aug-2017
https://doi.org/10.4102/td.v13i1.428
Haskins BBotha R(2014)A mixed-method approach to normalising Dr. Math microtext2014 International Conference on Computational Science and Technology (ICCST)10.1109/ICCST.2014.7045182(1-6)Online publication date: Aug-2014
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCST.2014.7045182
Butgereit LBotha R(2013)An architecture for synchronous micro-volunteering in Africa using social media2013 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOM Workshops)10.1109/PerComW.2013.6529477(175-180)Online publication date: Mar-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/PerComW.2013.6529477

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