Help me! Online Learner Support through the self-organised Allocation of Peer Tutors

In response to increased teacher loads for tutoring in online environments the paper explains a self-organised networking mechanism that actively selects and allocates a peer student from the population of learners to each request for assistance. Rather than posting a call for help in the uncertainty of the community, the requesting student is actively paired by the networking mechanism with the best selected peer candidate to provide support. To this end, the allocation mechanism has to serve two conflicting requirements: 1) the allocated peers should have sufficient knowledge about the particular topic to guarantee high quality support and 2) tutoring workload of peers should be fairly distributed over the student population. It is demonstrated under what conditions the proposed approach contributes to preserving appropriate and affordable online tutoring services without overloading the teachers.