# 7


I appreciate Remington’s positive take on online tutoring; however, I feel compelled to critique many of Remington’s insights. Remington stipulates that he is not attempting to demonstrate that online tutoring is necessarily better than face-to-face tutoring, but only wants to point out some possible benefits to online tutoring. It is strange that he chooses to begin his piece by talking about global writing issues, such as organization, thesis statement, flow, and argument, but then proceeds to mainly address local writing issues in his examples of how to be an effective online tutor. Could it be that it is more difficult to address global writing issues through online tutoring? Furthermore, his anecdotal evidence of students explaining the effectiveness of his online tutoring is probably not the norm or at least is not the norm in my experience. Often feedback is sent off from the tutor to the student with no further communication between the two parties. This makes it much more difficult to discern whether online tutoring strategies are effective. Tutoring face-to-face on the other hand allows the tutor to check for understanding and comprehension and, most importantly, allows for dialogical interactions. For example, in improving a vague thesis statement, a writing tutor can have a back and forth dialogue with the student to address the student’s specific areas of misunderstanding or weakness and then work toward a solution through a continued dialogue. This type of interaction is quite rare in an online tutoring environment.

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  1. UnknownMarch 5, 2019 at 8:34 AM

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  2. UnknownMarch 5, 2019 at 8:35 AM

    Your critiques are interesting, particularly what you've said about addressing global issues. In my role of teacher I have found that it's difficult to critique global issues via email for the reason you've given: it's hard to check for comprehension. I have to just barrel on with my email with the hope that they see what I'm talking about. I suppose my rebuttal would just be that in an email environment a student can reread the tutor's comments, hopefully aiding their understanding. I agree also that it is unlikely that we will receive much feedback on our online tutoring jobs, but we don't always receive genuine feedback in person either--I always ask my students if our time was helpful, and they say yes, but do they really feel free to say no? (Of course when they offer the comment that it's been helpful without prompting, that's always rewarding.) - Kathleen

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