Building an Online Writing Center: Student Tutors Look to the Past to Construct a Future (2009)

First Paragraph

In the spring semester of 2007 at Rutgers University, eight undergraduate student tutors and the Coordinator of one of Rutgers’s three Writing Centers met every two weeks to participate in the Writing Center Internship course. The mission of that internship was to consider the following question: “What does the future hold for tutoring?” The future, for us, concerned online tutoring. We decided to try to understand how an online writing center resource could work at our school; the interns’ task was to read and respond to texts that considered the philosophy of writing centers, for both face-to-face and online tutoring, and to survey the different kinds of online writing centers that already existed. They then tested their preferred versions of online tutoring with students while reflecting on the experience in the context of the literature that we read in the course. At the end of the semester, each intern wrote a 10-page paper, offering answers to the question that formed the foundation for the course. Collectively, their main conclusion was an obvious but important one: any form of online tutoring which does not foster the same kind of metacognition that is often brought about in face-to-face tutoring does a disservice to the student and to the tutor.

Citation Information

Type of Publication: Newsletter Article

Authors: Karen Kalteissen, Heather Robinson

Year of Publication: 2009

Title:Building an Online Writing Center: Student Tutors Look to the Past to Construct a Future

Publication: Writing Lab Newsletter, Volume 33, Issue 8

Page Range: 6-9