OPTIMUM Interactions: Improving the Online Tutoring Experience

Student participation in tutoring has been correlated with improvements in students' final course grades as well as persistence, retention, and degree completion. Additionally, peer tutoring has been shown to help students develop positive mindsets and self-perceptions. Access to quality tutoring, therefore, is an issue of equity at both the classroom and institutional levels. Although most universities offer some form of no-cost in-person tutoring for students, many students are unable to utilize these services for reasons such as illness, physical limitations, immunocompromised status, work schedules, or child/elder care needs. Furthermore, it is often these students who are already at increased risk of failing courses or withdrawing from the university, making it all the more important that resources like tutoring are not only available to them, but maximally accessible. To do so, many universities have begun to offer no-cost tutoring online. We seek to ensure a high-quality online tutoring experience is available.

We collected video recordings of synchronous mathematics tutoring sessions in the online environment. Data were collected from tutors at two large universities in the United States. Framing these interactions in existing literature on best practices in the in-person tutoring environment, we examined student-tutor interactions and identified tutor practices and dispositions that promoted a student-centered learning environment. In this presentation, we will discuss some of these practices, and we will introduce handbooks and training materials that we have developed for both tutors and tutor trainers to prepare them to assist students in the online environment. We will discuss three online train-the-trainers workshops we have hosted at no cost to participants. In particular, we will present video case-studies which can be used during online tutor training to help tutors identify and reflect upon opportunities to create a more student-centered learning experience.

We acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation, NSF-IUSE: 2201747.