iPASS Project: An Online Tutoring System

One of the major challenges faced by the Campus Writing Center at Queensborough Community College ( QCC), a member institution of the City University of New York (CUNY), has always been finding effective strategies for supporting remedial writing students. Since many of its tutees are part-time students and/or students whose first language is not English, the Campus Writing Center needed a way to provide more flexible meeting times and access to services outside of the Center's usual operating hours. An online tutoring system was one obvious way to meet these needs, and this option offered the additional benefit of providing a central location in which students could store and track multiple revisions of their work, access reference materials, exhibit creative work with their peers, and collaborate with others. However, we knew online tutoring would present its own challenges, as any system would have, in accommodating students with a variety of learning styles and needs. While tutors had already found strategies for dealing with this challenge in face-to-face tutoring, we were mindful of the need to adjust these strategies in order to accommodate remote and asynchronous learning.