Although text-based communication has become the primary way institutions of higher learning deliver and receive information, Hewett (2010) observes that clear communication in text-based, online environments is challenging even for the most experienced online instructors and tutors:
In preparing peer tutors for responding to student writers in an asynchronous Online Writing Lab (OWL), writing center administrators must engage tutors in activities that focus on writing about students’ writing rather than talking face-to-face with writers.
This study directly compares face-to-face writing center consultations with two closely related variations of Online Writing Instruction (OWI). Although the study takes place in a busy, dynamic writing center, the authors try to make their comparisons as systematic as possible so they can better foreground some of the benefits and disadvantages of various conferencing environments.
Writing centers can help multilingual students who hear many varieties of World Englishes and need to learn to write academic English, but in order to do this, writing center directors must guide their tutors on questions such as the following: In a digital environment, how can tutors engage L2 students in dialogs that are productive for academic writing? How can online tutors overcome comparisons that pit the many varieties of students’ writing against a hegemonic “ideal text”? What are the alternatives for responding to perceived errors of form?
Researchers from Kaplan University present findings from a media-rich feedback pilot program that targets students from developmental writing courses. One study of student reactions reveals how screencasting feedback encouraged more formative, holistic feedback and students’ awareness of writing process, audience, and revision.
This study highlights the writing difficulty of tertiary students in ESL or EFL contexts. It describes two successful innovations, writing center and online writing lab, initiated by North American institutions of higher learning to intervene in the writing crisis.
Only recently has the community problematized space, moving the dialogue from what a center should do to what it means when a center does. In this critical vein, we approach our review of writing centers as spaces that impact their participants. Our treatment of writing center spaces follows a continuum. We move from the material, tangible, physical writing center to the more ethereal, digital space. We explore what it means to occupy a particular space and what identity constructions are possible in our physical and digital spaces.
David Coogan did report his work on e-mail-based tutoring with his own tutees and graduate student tutors, but he did not focus particularly on faculty as tutors (32). So, as we continued our work with faculty and student tutors, we wondered whether there is, indeed, a significant difference between faculty tutors and student tutors in our online setting.
In graduate school I was assigned to work as the Undergraduate Writing Center’s (UWC) Assistant Coordinator to fulfill part of my assistantship obligations. When I arrived, the Center’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) was available to a limited population of writers who could submit their work via Google's asynchronous g-mail.
In a recent Kairos article, “Expanding the Space of f2f,” Melanie Yergeau, Katie Wozniak, and Peter Vandenberg make the case for online synchronous tutoring. Though arguments for online tutoring, synchronous or not, have been made frequently over the last fifteen years, what is different about this piece is an emphasis on what they called “audio-video-textual conferencing” or AVT tutoring.