Written by Karen Kalteissen and Heather Robinson and published in the April 2009 Writing Lab Newsletter, this article speaks to some of the concerns I've heard from you regarding our online tutoring. The main concern appears to be that it's too easy to become a proofreader online. I've also struggled with this.
Fatima Salemassi created this online system for us, and she emphasized the importance of requiring our online students to specify which aspect of their paper they wanted us to focus on. I believe that she did this to promote metacognition ("knowing about knowing") in our online writers. It's something comp professors do when they assign reflective letters with portfolios. The research reveals, again and again, that when writers think about their own writing, they become better writers.
We moved to live online tutoring because it reflects the Writing Center's philosophy of interaction with students. We don't want them to e-mail their drafts to us and passively wait for a response. Successful tutoring is a social activity, a back-and-forth, and we were missing that with our old system.
But live online tutoring has some drawbacks, too, as we're finding. We're a creative bunch--how can we address these drawbacks? This article seems to indicate that combining live tutoring and e-mail works best. What do you think about that? And how do we cope with those "uncomfortable silences"?
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This was a perfect aritcle for me to read because it perfectly matched my feelings about online tutoring. I do have a hard time keeping myself from being an editor, because sometimes I have a hard time explaining something in a live chat that would be so easy to explain face to face. This is so frustrating that it is really hard to resist being an editor.
ReplyDeleteI strongly believe in what we do here at the Writing Center. It is so much more important to me a minimalist tutor and help students become strong writers on their own than it is to fix their mistakes for them. Writing Center tutors may not always be available to those who come to us for help, so it is important that we teach them how to be confident in themselves and not rely on us. When I began online tutoring, I was not sure how this could happen if I could not be face to face with the student that I was helping. I am still skeptical at times, and I always encourage the on-line student to also stop by the Writing Center if they have the chance.
I have found that it helps to ask the student to pick on area to focus on. With an online appointment that lasts a half hour, that really is all that there is time for. As far as uncomfortable silences, I really do not find them uncomfortable. I always assume that the person needs time to think and type.
I do like the idea of online tutoring, and I think the way we do it is the best possible way. However, I do not think online could ever completely replace old-fashioned, face to face tutoring. As a supplement, it is great.
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ReplyDeleteI really liked the idea of using email tutoring to supplement face-to-face tutoring. Requiring students to submit a writing progress report two days before a face-to-face session encourages students to think about their writing before meeting with a tutor, which goes along with the Writing Center philosophy of fostering metacognition in student writers. Although I don’t think this is something we should implement, I find the idea intriguing. It would probably be a lot more difficult to remain minimalistic through email tutoring, though.
ReplyDeleteAlthough it can be difficult to narrow down the tutoring session to one topic and to convey certain concepts through writing alone, the live chats do mimic a face-to-face session enough to allow for a minimalist approach. In a live chat, it’s easier to ask students questions about their assignments and to get them thinking about their writing on their own. It can be challenging to have an in-depth session online, especially when time constraints are taken into account. For this reason, I do support the use of online tutoring as supplemental only, not as something that students should always do.
Perhaps offering tutoring via Skype, or a similar service, would work also, since it combines the more personal aspects of face-to-face tutoring with the accessibility of live chat tutoring. Being able to speak instead of having to type and wait for the response of the student would improve communication and possibly improve the amount of ground the student and tutor could cover. Since not everyone has a webcam, this couldn’t be the only online tutoring offered, but it would be an interesting alternative to explore.
One of the major problems that I have experienced with online tutoring, that was also addressed in the article, is how to deal with grammar issues. We obviously focus first on higher level concerns but there are times when the organization is fine. It has always been tedious for me to point out specific grammar errors during online tutoring.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the tips that the article had to deal with this issue. Having the student pick a few paragraphs in which they see errors, puts some responsibility back on them, and also makes it easier for the tutor to make sure the student is looking at the same line when discussing an error. Picking only one or two main errors that the student makes repeatedly I think also helps the student actually learn something. Hopefully they will learn to look for the same errors in future papers.
The other part of the suggestion that I thought was great, was to link the tutor's explanation of how to fix an error with an online article about that same mistake. Again, this process is teaching them something and perhaps actually helping the student to be become a better writer.
I found this article thought provoking, especially after also reading the other tutors’ comments, because I am still adjusting to this new form of online tutoring. After using the “Review” feature to leave bubble comments on papers with the online tutoring via e-mail last year, switching to live chatting was slightly odd. Being able to interact directly with the students is definitely a plus, yet there are a few areas about which I am still forming my opinion. The pauses while the student is thinking and typing do not bother me, although I sometimes wish there was a little icon to show when the other person is typing to avoid sending messages simultaneously. I feel like the only big drawback with our new online tutoring is trying to tell a student which part of the paper we may be discussing (“It’s the second sentence in the third paragraph…”). Perhaps using “Review” to highlight main sections that we want to discuss, and e-mailing that back to the student before the tutoring session began might be a possible solution – not marking up the small issues, necessarily, but the HOCs that we wanted to pinpoint. On the other hand, this could get in the way of the student directing the tutoring session…
ReplyDeleteThe article’s discussion of using e-mail tutoring along with face-to-face tutoring was a great idea, yet it seems like that writing center’s approach would have been altered slightly because the students are building on five weekly tutoring sessions. Plus, the main reason we offer online tutoring is to accommodate long distance students who might find it difficult to make it in to the Writing Center. However, what if we combined e-mail tutoring with the live chat? We already ask the student to pick out something to focus on, but what if we developed a mini reflection sheet of questions that we asked the student to briefly answer and include in the e-mail with his or her paper? Not only would that encourage the student to give extra thought to the writing, it would also help direct the tutor in what she paid special attention to when reviewing the paper before chatting with the student.
Although online tutoring will have a long way to go before it could hope to measure up to tutoring face-to-face, I think with a bit of experimentation we could continue to improve our system. Moving towards employing Skype is very exciting, too.
I'm glad this article discusses online tutoring as a supplement rather than alternative to face-to-face tutoring. Some of the theories, however, contrast with reality, at least based on online tutoring experiences in our writing center. In the final paragraph of the section titled "Email tutoring," the authors point out that asynchronous online tutoring can be effective "provided that the set-up is strong enough." At Madonna, we have only synchronous (live chat) tutoring so far, and we don't have much in the way of established procedures yet, because online tutoring was only introduced last year. The experience of both students and tutors using online tutoring at Madonna University can be a lot more helpful to students if we developed an emphasis on it being a supplement rather than substitute, and if we adapted some of the structure discussed in this article to our writing center's policies and practices regarding online tutoring.
ReplyDeleteFirst, if Madonna wants online tutoring to be truly useful to students in the long-term, rather than just for quick fixes, we need to stress to students that they must come for in-person tutoring at least occasionally, so they're not just chatting with a tutor in a contextual vacuum and trying to solicit editorial and proofreading comments rather than suggestions for content development. Second, the article points out that in online tutoring the temptation to use "maximalist" rather than minimalist tutoring methods is more strong, so we need to devote some of our professional development meeting time to discussing how to prepare tutors to resist being more directive online than in-person. Third, we need to require that students submit their papers farther ahead of time than half an hour, and include both a description of the assignment criteria and a description of what they want help with. When we schedule online appointments, we need to be consistent in instructing students to do this. Otherwise, what happens is the tutor gets a blank email with a paper attached, and doesn't have any idea what the student is trying to accomplish while the tutor is reading the paper in preparation for the chat session. When the student signs on, it can take up to half the session just to get this information out of the student, and then the tutor doesn't have enough time left in the session to thoroughly reread the paper with these criteria in mind. If we made it a requirement for students to describe in the bodies of their emails what they're submitting and why they tutoring help with it, that will help both student and tutor get the most out of the online tutoring experience.
There is one idea these authors expressed that I don't find helpful, however. The authors seem to think that students who are supposedly tech-savvy will take more control and feel more empowered when using a technological medium for tutoring. We have to be aware that if students are supposedly tech-savvy, that doesn't automatically mean they'll be more proactive in online tutoring than during in-person tutoring. If a student displays a lack of initiative and a desire for tutors to co-write their papers in person, that student will do the same thing online. If anything, the "convenience" of being able to do yet one more task online instead of in-person may make these tendencies worse.
In conclusion, even though the results of the project discussed in this article seem overly idealized, and most likely unduplicatable with anything less than the exact conditions that existed at Rutgers University during this project, we should keep this article on hand to help generate ideas when we consider how to create a more consistent and practical structure for our online tutoring program.