Alina Vamanu, blog post #7

I really enjoyed reading about online tutoring this week. I have not done any online tutoring so far, but I have taught online courses multiple times, and I would say that there are many benefits to online teaching (and, most likely, to online tutoring, as well). In my experience, online education gives non-traditional students the opportunity to study. Many of these students work, raise children, care for elderly relatives, and live far from campus. Their busy lives make their college experience more difficult and, thus, put them at a disadvantage compared to their younger peers. Online teaching can offer these students the flexibility they need to complete their studies. I would imagine that the same goes for online tutoring. Students who have limited time outside of regular classes have few incentives to come to the Writing Center and ask for help. Online tutoring seems to be the answer to their problem, and I would be curious to know whether online tutoring does indeed attract more non-traditional students than face-to-face tutoring.

In my experience, there is also another advantage to online teaching: more writing. In my online courses, students had to write bi-weekly responses to demonstrate that they had read the texts and engaged closely with at least some of the authors' ideas and arguments. Students had specific requirements for their responses (number of words, questions to answer, etc.), and most of them ended up submitting elaborate, thoughtful, and sometimes deeply original comments. In class, students may or may not speak, but in my online courses, students had to submit a couple of comments every week. They wrote more, and these exercises gave them the opportunity to reflect and articulate their thoughts. Does online tutoring work in similar ways? Sometimes, students who come to the Writing Center in person do not have a draft ready for review, and prefer to chat about their assignments. While this may be helpful in the early stages of writing a paper, I believe that it is much more useful for them to have at least a few ideas jotted down. Do students who use online tutoring tend to present more substantial drafts?

Clearly, online education raises many challenges, but there are benefits to it as well, so I look forward to talking about this complex issue with everyone in class.

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