In the fall of 2000, the Learning Lab started to offer online English tutoring through a website. The initial mandate for this service was fairly general. Since the College was part of the PA Virtual Community College and was increasing its role in online courses, the Learning Lab was called on to provide academic support. When online English tutoring was offered, it was accessible to the College as a whole, not just students associated with the Virtual Comunity College project, and now, after four years, it is perhaps an appropriate time to review what has been done and to refine the online English support.
The Learning Lab joined an ongoing, national activity when it offered online tutoring. Online writing labs or OWL’s, the term OWL is attributed to Muriel Harris of Purdue University (Brown, 2000), have been in existence since the late ‘80s. When setting up its site, the Learning Lab looked to other colleges and commercial ventures who had been offering online academic support. Allegheny County College served as an early model since it was a large, urban, Pennsylvania community college and the online writing center at the Community College of Denver had a robust program which attracted a good number of students. Some commercial sites which offered online tutoring, such as Smarthinking.com (available 24 hours a day, seven days a week), set standards for accessibility, technological sophistication, and consumer friendliness.
When implementing online English support, the Lab continued both its policy of assisting any enrolled student at Community College of Philadelphia and presenting its services as instructional. The website asked browsers to provide some identification so their status with the College could be verified, if needed, and the website stated, “The Learning Lab is not an editing or proofreading service. The Lab provides instruction in a context which is distinct from the classroom.” From the beginning, however, it was clear that the online English tutoring would probably appeal to students other than those who visited one of the Lab sites for assistance and that online tutorial instruction would probably be different from that offered in a face-to-face situation. But how different would audience and context be?
Over the past four years, the Lab advertised to students through a number of sources and worked with instructors in special programs. This has resulted in about 130 online tutoring sessions. However, in the past year, despite doing very little advertising, we have attracted 16 students who made 40 online contacts with the Lab for online English tutoring. These students, who found and used the online English tutoring in the past year, probably represent the type of student to whom online support should direct its efforts. Like water in a container, the English online tutoring has found its own level.
Audience
In some respects, the online students are not that different than the students who visit the Lab for personal assistance. Most of the 16 online students were African American females, as are most of the students seeking face-to-face tutoring support. Their median age was above the college mean, 34 as opposed to 26 (College Fact Book, Table 55). The typical profile of a student comfortable with computers is likely to be a young, white male, but the profile of the students using computers to seek online assistance seems to indicate that others can comfortably and efficiently use computers connected to the Internet for instructional purposes.
Most of the online students, 10, were taking English 101, with 3 in English 102 and 3 in English 098. Six of the students were taking their English course one evening a week, on Fridays, at a regional center, and five of them were taking their course online. Online tutoring is intended to provide access to students who are not able to take advantage of conventional Learning Lab support, which is offered weekdays from about 9:00 am into the evening (9:00 pm on some nights, 8:00 on others), on Saturdays, and on a more limited schedule at the regional centers. The students taking English 101 on Friday evenings at a regional center were probably working and were unavailable for personal tutoring assistance. The students taking the online English course were probably likewise unavailable or uninterested in coming to the Learning Lab.
Jackson (2000) highlighted the characteristics of individual, personal tutoring when he wrote “the face-to-face (f2f) tutorial cannot be processed through fiber-optics, for both the writer and the tutor are real individuals, with real writing needs; it is an on-going dialogue that needs eye contact, body language, direct and indirect questioning, and the writer’s response.” As a colleague pointed out years ago, when computerized academic assistance was much less sophisticated, a student seeking academic support and given a choice will probably select to work with a person rather than a machine.
However, at times, the online option may still be attractive. The total tutoring contacts of the sixteen recent online tutees were reviewed, and it seems that about seven of them only used the online tutoring option. The other nine had some contact with the Lab staff and on-campus Lab sites, either in previous semesters or in the same semester in which they received online assistance, but they used online tutoring when it fit into their schedules. The draw of face-to-face tutoring is still strong, but it does not always trump the less personal, online approach.
Most of the students who used online English tutoring were doing well academically. Eight of the students who used the online English tutoring earned a grade of B or better in their classes, and another two took ungraded courses, but they passed with a P. Why did these good students seek assistance? Ever since its inception, good students have used the Learning Lab. They may want confirmation, clarification, or stimulation. These reasons for visiting the Lab confound the myth that academic support is only for weak students.
Context
The Learning Lab has tried to present itself as a welcoming, student-centered place, and it attempts to extend these qualities to students who use the online Lab services, but this is challenging. Jackson (2000) indicates how difficult it can be to establish interpersonal contact online when he asks, “But online, where is the tutor? Perhaps more importantly, where is the writer? The most frightening prospect of the online tutorial is that all one is left with is the writing and not the writer, the product and not the process.”
Since it is acknowledged that online tutoring at least has a text, the writing, to share, the Learning Lab’s online component uses this common factor as the basis for communication. Students send drafts of their essays as either attachments, in Microsoft Word, or as e-mail text, and they fill out a short form indicating what aspects of the paper the tutor can assist them with. Consequently, both the tutor and the student focus on the writing.
Jackson’s suggestion that the personalities of the writer and tutor are missing in online communication might be a bit exaggerated. Stories abound of strangers initiating and maintaining meaningful communication online, and the possibilities for significant interaction are real. While online interactions may be strong, the qualities of computer mediated discourse are likely to differ, and these differences are often based on gender and education. (Wade and Fauske (2004) give a background discussion on some of the problems and differences, based on gender and background, which characterize computer mediated discussion.) While only one Lab faculty member was involved in online tutoring, a review of the e-mail correspondence in the past year showed that some students established fairly long interactions with the e-mail tutor, exchanging more than two messages. Some interactions only consisted of one exchange. This mirrors the quantity of face-to-face interactions in the Learning Lab, where a few students return for tutoring appointments, and many others only drop in for one visit.
The online tutoring request form gives the writers a chance to select, from a list of topics, those which are considered most important. The students usually ask for assistance with topics related to organization and development of the essay rather than mechanics. The list below gives the number of times respondents requested assistance with each topic. A summary of the topics requested shows that items related to the structure of the essay were of most concern.
| Number of Requests | Topic |
| 27 |
Thesis |
| 21 | Organization |
| 14 |
Coherence |
| 13 |
Run-ons, Comma splices |
| 11 |
Development |
| 9 |
Subject-Verb agreement |
| 4 |
Verb tense |
| 7 |
Fragments |
| 1 | Pronoun reference |
| 2 | Other |
While this list represents the areas which the student writers selected, it might be different if the tutors identified the problem areas in the papers. Even though the students did not ask for assistance with some areas related to the mechanics of writing, such as pronoun reference, that does not mean that there were no problems in those areas.
Recommendations
Now that the Learning Lab has four years of experience with online English tutoring, it is an appropriate time to consider changes and adjustments to the system to strengthen it.
References
Jackson, J.A.(2000). "Interfacing the Faceless: Maximizing the Advantages of Online Tutoring." Writing Lab Newsletter 25.2 (2000) Online at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/lab/owl/tutoring/JacksonOnlineTutoring.html, July 2004.
Table 55: Age distribution of all students on campus and off campus, credit and non-credit, fall 2003. College Fact Book Online at http://www.ccp.edu/vpfin-pl/factbook/AGE-ALL.pdf, August, 2004.
Wade, Suzanne E. & Janice R. Fauske.(2004). Dialogue online: Prospective teachers’ discourse strategies in computer-mediated discussions. Reading Research Quarterly, April/May/June 2004, 134-161.
Online links to sites mentioned in article Community College of Denver OWL Community College of Allegheny County Community College of Philadelphia Learning Lab Online English Tutoring ©Copyright 2005. Contact author for permission Maintained by Jay Howard,Jan 2005
