The impact and opportunities of e-tutoring in a challenged socio-economic environment

As social network sites rise in popularity, the youth spends large amounts of their time browsing the Internet and interacting via social network sites. Furthermore, social network sites creates opportunities that allow the youth to connect to different learning environments and thus opens up options for new dimensions to learn. This gives rise to research on a shift from conversational to education content of social media. However, due to social and economic challenged circumstances, many children in third world countries cannot share in these opportunities. Poor numeracy and literacy levels achieved in basic education, predict huge stumble blocks for these learners during their school career. Added the huge shortage of teachers who can provide mother tongue education to non-English speaking learners, a challenge is inevitable. But the rapid technological changes in information and communication technology enable people to help one another, even over distance. Situated in this context, the broad aim of this ongoing research is to investigate how the use of social networking tools as a platform for cross-age e-tutoring addresses the social and educational needs of social and economic challenged learners. The first part of this ongoing research used an experimental study and the conclusions drawn clearly indicates that the possibility exists for adolescent tutors to develop a higher self-esteem when administered in a position as tutors of younger tutees. The younger tutee also indicated that it was a positive learning and social experience. These results are enough reason to redo this research by moving to a quasi-experimental research method with a control group.