Ian Post #7

I've never done online tutoring, and until I read the chapter from Bedford on it, I wasn't too thrilled about the concept. Face-to-face contact is very important to me, both because I like to process my student's body language to check for understanding and because I think it can occasionally come off as cold in online commentary (I'll have to work on that). To some extent, I still worry about these problems. I particularly like to gauge from the student's voice at the end of the session if they're confident in their plan of revision, and I'll miss that element. However, one thing I (naively) didn't consider about asynchronous tutoring was the benefit of the time difference. I sometimes feel crushed by time constraints, particularly during my 30-minute appointments - I can sometimes spend anywhere from 15-17 minutes reading and processing the work, which gives me little time to relay feedback and, very importantly, to ensure my student understood the feedback. Occasionally when I feel strained for time I start blurting out word salad, so this isn't always a great combo for me. A time delay would really help ensure I can organize my thoughts and articulate them in a clear way. Now I'm actually excited to try asynchronous tutoring (huzzah!).


Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 10, 2018 at 11:12 AM

    For all the reasons you mentioned, I'm also actually exciting to try online tutoring! With my two new PhD students, I spend a lot of time trying to understand the actual content of the writing they present, and that doesn't leave me much time to really think and provide (what I hope to be) substantive, useful feedback. Luckily both of those students have 1-hour appointments, but that hour can really fly by.

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