Who is the tutor?
The tutors are not only engaged in a limited range of topics connected to their courses, they are there to support the students so that the latter may develop their individual skills. The tutors are there to advise on the choice of courses to be included in student’s plan, to help with scientific activities and event to help with administrative matters. However, their most crucial role is to accurately identify the potential of a person they work with and to designate the development path of the said person.
The tutors are able to provide those benefits that traditional, mass education systems cannot - attention to a specific tutee and the possibility to adjust the educational path of this person to his or her specific situation. The work of a tutor is more than just passing on knowledge and verifying it - a tutor must take a step further and teach independent thinking and arriving at opinions grounded in knowledge, as well as to teach how to defend these opinions publicly. Moreover, the tutor’s virtues include didactic efficiency and the long-lasting effects he or she can deliver. Thus, this method makes the academic ethos (of seeking truth and creating a communion between the master and the apprentice) with scholarly effectiveness.
The goal of the tutor is to develop the skills and supervise the education process of an individual student to enable this person to prepare a diploma paper. This end, he or she utilizes the following tools and practices:
- collaborative work on devising the individual education programme, ending with a defence of a diploma paper,
- setting / monitoring / supervising the student’s development path by means of tutorings (meetings with the student or the students,
- teaching and verifying the student’s ability to independently seek knowledge.
At the Faculty of Mechatronics, a tutor may be an academic teacher or a scientific employee who meets the following criteria:
- owns the title of at least a PhD,
- is experienced in conducting diploma papers,
- is experienced in conducting didactic courses,
- has an up-to-date scientific or training portfoli.
The decision on whether an academic teacher or a scientific employee not meeting the above criteria can become a tutor, is made by the Faculty of Mechatronics Council.