Digitization of the tutoring system in Slovenian secondary schools

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Finding help for students is a major problem for students. Most of the students in the lower years often have questions about the subject matter. Due to the lack of contacts between students of different classes, it is difficult to get access to relevant information.

Many schools operate a tutoring system, the aim of which is to offer an alternative to tutoring, accessible to all students, but this often does not come to life. This is how we, as students of Velenje Gymnasium, decided to form ourselves free of charge the OpenTutor mobile application, which supports the designed program at our school and at the same time connects students of different years.

The application is primarily intended to establish the first contact between the person seeking help and the tutor. We have noticed that contacting tutors via existing social networks can be quite time-consuming, and at the same time, the list of tutors is only available on the high school's website and is only updated once a year, which makes it impossible to include new tutors in the system. We solved this problem with the function of browsing the database of tutors, in which students can voluntarily join.

When a student finds a suitable tutor, they can contact them via their school e-mail, the Microsoft Teams network, or the integrated live chat function, which in addition to sending text messages also supports photos. The user can see if his message has been opened. Push messages warn him about the answer.

We are aware that many students often want to find an answer to a simple question, for which they do not need the help of a tutor. All registered students can thus participate and help each other through a free forum, where they can ask questions and answer them anonymously. The questions are separated according to the subjects to which they relate, and users can also evaluate the usefulness of the answers. At the same time, the forum can also serve as a bulletin board for school announcements.

**What the forum looks like and how new questions are posted**

Users access the content on the OpenTutor platform by logging in through their school Microsoft accounts. So is the user base limited only to students and school staff of the Velenje school center, which ensures a safe learning environment.

In the future, we would like to extend the app's usefulness to other Slovenian schools by implementing the ArnesAAI system.

Users can download the app from the Google Play Store: