Dr. Mimi Harvey, Communication Studies faculty member, recently traveled to Seoul, South Korea to meet with Dr. Lee Hunyul, Korea University faculty, through the help of an International Education Global Engagement Mini-grant. The purpose of this meeting was to begin development of a joint Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project. COIL is a model for teaching and learning that promotes the development of intercultural competence (the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately with people from other cultures) through a shared online multicultural learning environment.

During the recent visit, Dr. Lee and Dr. Harvey began the process of developing a joint project that will meet the COIL objectives: exposure to different cultures leading to increased global awareness; a better understanding of the one’s identity; and more experience and greater comfort levels with the tools and processes involved in collaborating with remote partners. They hope to pilot the project in Spring Quarter, 2018. Although Dr. Harvey is presently on sabbatical, you may contact her at mharvey@shoreline.edu if you are interested in learning more about COIL projects.

It was such a pleasure to honor all of our graduates with you on Sunday! It was also bittersweet to see so many tutors among the graduates. We’re extremely proud of them, but we’re also really going to miss them as they move on to their next adventures. Many of our current tutors will not be returning after this spring, so we are actively seeking new tutors across the curriculum. As you wrap up your spring quarter, please reach out to any of your students who you think would excel in a job supporting others while sharing their knowledge and encourage them to apply to become tutors! Students don’t always think of themselves as “tutor material,” so encouragement from their instructors and mentors can make a very meaningful impact.

To qualify for an interview, applicants should:

• have at least a 3.5 or an instructor recommendation (forms available) in the courses to be tutored and a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or above.
• have a strong desire to help others learn with professionalism and patience!
• carefully fill out our application, including brief but thoughtful responses to the two questions at the end.

We do our best to provide tutors to students in ANY course offered at Shoreline Community College, from accounting to visual communications technology, so we are interested in tutors across the curriculum. Most recently, we have struggled to meet the student demand in areas such as business technology, geography, nursing, statistics, and a wide variety of 200-level STEM courses, and we know we are losing tutors in a wide sweep of courses, from accounting to physics, Japanese to nutrition, computer science to communication studies, and much more.

Tutoring Services welcomes and encourages both domestic and international student applicants as well as qualified non-students, and we strive to employ tutors who represent the diversity of SCC’s student population. There is a hiring process for all applicants, which can take time as it moves from the initial application, to an interview, to paperwork, to HR processing and activation. Qualified domestic students who are interviewed and offered a position might start three or more weeks from their date of application. Given the month+ timeline for acquiring a social security card through completing new hire paperwork, qualified international students often have a longer wait to start actively tutoring. Because of the time this hiring process takes, we are particularly interested in those who will be able to tutor more than one quarter, but we consider all qualified applicants.

Thank you for helping us recruit a wonderful new bunch of tutors to join our team!