The main campus tutoring center now offers online tutoring for all its current classes this semester.
As a Spanish and ESL tutor for the Center for Academic Achievement (CFAA), I am delighted at our new online technology and the idea of using it during tutoring sessions, and thus I wanted to give the student body an inside scoop on the pros and cons of signing up for online tutoring versus regular tutoring, so they can make an informed decision.
The biggest and most obvious advantage of online tutoring is convenience. It can be done from the laptop at home or anywhere. This not only saves considerable travel time (whether you’d commute from Virginia or Centennial Hall), but it also saves time preparing for the public eye. The optional webcam for tutoring can stay off, and you can communicate over your microphone with your tutor in your pajamas and with your bed head.
“I think there are two benefits to online tutoring,” Erik Peterson, one of my supervisors who rules with an iron fist said (Just joking, Erik). “First, we can assist distance students who are unable to physically come to campus for tutoring. Second, students who are nervous or unsure about coming to the tutoring center can explore tutoring from the comfort of their dorm or home.”
Another advantage is the high-tech equipment of the online software used for the tutoring session. Students and tutors have access therein to some useful resources, such as a graphing calculator and equation editor for math, a bond drawing tool for chemistry, an equation editor for physics, insertable tables for business and a reference library for all of them. These are valuable tools I hope students will use.
While considering the conspicuous benefits of online tutoring, it is also helpful to be aware of ways in which students might prefer the familiar face-to-face tutoring. In the traditional tutoring style, the students have personal interaction with their tutors. Also, it’s simply more therapeutic to sit down with a human being to work through your academic problems. Along those lines, as most communication is done via body language, students and teachers can read each other better in a personal tutoring scenario.
Practically speaking, there is a simplicity to just sitting down and talking, with or without a sheet of paper or book. If a textbook is used in the session, the student and tutor can flip through it with much more graceful facility than if online tutoring was the intermediary. Were this to happen in the online scenario, you could take a cell-phone picture of the book and text it to a certain number giving you an access code to share it on the screen where the tutor can see it, or you could copy and paste words from an online book onto the screen, but I think direct interaction with the textbook in a face-to-face meeting is clearly better in this case.
Of course, it’s new technology to us. Need I say more? We know from experience that we cannot bank on software always functioning correctly or our ability to navigate it. Naturally it will become more familiar and more comfortable to us the more it’s used.
Whether you choose online tutoring or to see one of us in person in the Sherrod Library, we are happy to work with you. Though many students might feel hesitant to go to tutoring for assistance in a class, tutoring is nothing to be ashamed of. I’ve gone myself, and we see a good many students every week, including graduate students. God didn’t design us to be self-reliant people, and there’s no shame but rather something to be gained in learning from another person.
So if you or a loved one is struggling with math, chemistry or one of many other illnesses, the CFAA is one of your pharmacy options, and now you have the prescription, whether you choose to order it online or pick it up in person.
