Nick Carbone writes:

We keep it simple and straightforward. First, we discuss drop in tutoring and the principles for good tutoring--not fixing things for the writer, helping the writer to discover and learn more about what they are doing as they write, guiding the writer to being able to work on the writing issue at hand more independently, not taking over the paper and so on. Then we talk about how hard it is to do that online in our situation, which is based upon having a paper submitted via a form
http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/WritingCenter/sndpaper/sendpaper.htm where tutors then comment on the essay and reply.

We operate w/ some constraints, mostly time. We don't have tutors who specialize on online tutoring; all tutors are asked to do it. So we ask a tutor not to take more than 30-45 minutes (average length of walk-in visit) per paper. That means we can't (and don't ) read all of the long papers, only enough to get a gist. Comments do tend to become more directive because unlike face to face situation where you can ask questions and see by body language and hear by response how helpful those questions may or may not be, online, it's one way communication generally.

So we talk a good deal about the f2f principles and then about carrying those over to online. But since the technologies differ radically, so too then does the form the feedback will take and therefore as well its substance and tone. We work on making tutors aware of this by sending them papers as part of the training and then by having them respond to them. We discuss those responses in training and via an email list, much the way we might discuss how tutors handle a drop in session that we 'listen in on.'

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