1. Introduction

[1] When I was hired for the full-time position I now hold at the University of Maryland Writing Center, I knew that I had committed to implementing asynchronous online tutoring in the very near future. During my interview, members of the committee brought up the recent expansion of blended and online writing classes on campus and suggested that asynchronous online tutoring could no longer be put off. Since I had already helped implement synchronous online tutoring during my years as a part-time administrator, and I had experience with the asynchronous modality from my time as an advisor at another institution where the writing center’s services were delivered completely online, I initially thought I knew exactly how to implement asynchronous services, as well. However, I then spent a year considering and reconsidering a number of questions that did not have easy answers:

• Which platform should we use?
• Will we be overwhelmed by students seeking help through this type of tutoring, and should we limit it to students in online or blended learning classes? Can we?
• How will we deliver tutoring advice?
• How will we train and schedule staff?
• Will asynchronous online tutoring force us to compromise our center’s philosophy of tutoring, and will it add to the misconceptions that some students, and some instructors, have about the writing center being a drop-off editing service?

[2] To try and answer some of these questions, naturally I turned to the scholarship and conversations other writing center professionals had engaged in. While I knew that our approach had to be tailored to our specific context and the students that we serve, I still looked for models of how other writing centers were offering asynchronous online tutoring, for articulations of some of the problems that others encountered or anticipated, and the solutions or trouble-shooting measures they implemented. Unfortunately for me, despite much wonderful work on online writing instruction (OWI) and online tutoring pedagogy by people like Beth Hewett (2015); Ben Rafoth (2009); Lisa Eastmond Bell (2011); David Carlson and Eileen Apperson-Williams (2008); George Cooper, Kara Bui, and Linda Riker (2008); and others, at that time at least, there was not much scholarship dedicated specifically to asynchronous online tutoring. Hewett (2015) wrote that the literature that does exist, “tends to focus on how online interactions should mirror the most popular of onsite tutoring practices,” that it “privileges orality and continues to focus on making the tutoring experience as close to the oral face-to-face experience as possible” (p. 2). Additionally, aside from the occasional question and handful of responses posted to WCenter, there was not much written about what a writing center can do to implement and establish asynchronous online tutoring.

[3] Despite this lack of scholarship and published guidance, I still needed to get asynchronous online tutoring started at my university, and I know that the number of writing centers implementing it will continue to grow. While we all need to tailor the service to our own needs, there are common questions writing centers should engage with for their asynchronous online tutoring model and the options they should be considering. In this article, I will offer a heuristic, based on research and my own experiences, for how other writing centers might establish asynchronous online tutoring as a new service by considering the following questions:

• Asynchronous Platform
• Should it include tools for responding to student work, or just collecting student requests?
• Should it filter or restrict users?
  
• Do you have staff available to monitor the platform?
  
• Do you already have a platform or tool in use?
  
• Do you have funds for a new platform, or resources to create a new, “in-house” platform?
  

• Advice Delivery
• How much work will tutors do for each request?
• How will the delivery method help tutors abide by your center’s tutoring philosophy?
• How will the delivery method work with the platform you use?
• Will tutors only respond in writing, or are other methods possible?
• How will you ensure broad accessibility to the type of feedback you provide?
• Tutor Training
• Will asynchronous training be provided to all tutors, or some?
• Can asynchronous training take place within current training methods?
• Will training take place over a short period of time or an entire semester?
• Will training happen in a class, staff meetings, or on-the-job?
• Tutor Scheduling
• How much demand will there be for asynchronous tutoring?
• How will the platform and delivery affect scheduling?
• Will there be restrictions on who can use the service, and how often?
• Which tutors will tutor asynchronously?
• Can tutors work remotely, outside of the center’s regular business hours, or only onsite?

2. Platforms: Email, LMS, or Online Scheduling System

[4] A platform will likely be the cornerstone of a writing center’s asynchronous online tutoring service, and one of the earliest—and what seemed to me most important—questions I faced was which platform we would use. Could we simply use an email account? We had already been using Gmail as a backup to our synchronous online sessions whenever connectivity issues on the student’s or tutor’s end made use of our usual platform impossible. Most students in nearly any class at any US college use email in at least one aspect of their lives and setting up an email account is easy and free. I considered that email enabled students to include papers as attachments, or individual questions or sections of a paper in the body of a message for answers or brief feedback from staff. Staff could review papers and send back feedback in track changes, or simply as a reply to the email. Gmail accounts and the like grant access to shareable tools like Google Docs where student and tutor can both view and make changes to and comment on a document. Unless manually deleted, all emails and accompanying work are stored within the email account. As far as access is concerned, an email platform for asynchronous online tutoring is really only limited to anyone who is aware of the email address and to those staff who know the password. Again, an email system would be free, easy, and could, once other decisions had been made, be set up in a matter of minutes.

[5] However, I realized early on that email would not work for us as an asynchronous platform because it did not offer enough structure or place any kind of limits on who could use the service, or how often. Our writing center employs about sixty tutors and serves, potentially, our entire undergraduate student population of approximately 30,0000 students through about 10,000 individual tutoring sessions each year. Faced with those kinds of numbers, and since we were only looking to add asynchronous online tutoring as an additional service to meet a specific need, I wondered if we should limit asynchronous online tutoring to students in the blended or online sections of our campus’s two required writing classes, just to keep the service more manageable. Additionally, as a matter of policy, unfortunately, we often have to turn away graduate students, alumni, and students from other institutions. I worried that a system based around an email account would not offer us enough of a filter to restrict the service to a specific population, or maintain reliably accurate records of who was actually using the service. Students might be asked to provide information about themselves or their class in their requests, identifying them as current students, or in classes currently served by the service, but resourceful non-students, or students we might choose not to make the service available to (students who were not currently enrolled in an online writing class, for example) could find creative ways around that. Email also does not, by itself, restrict the number of submissions or requests students can make in any given period of time—in a day or week. In her essay “Preserving the Rhetorical Nature of Tutoring When Going Online,” Lisa Bell (2011) wrote about opening the email account to find, “twenty-one papers waiting for me” (p. 327). With such a system, I knew we could find ourselves inundated with more requests for help than we could accommodate. There was also a matter of distribution and responsibility. New messages and threads can get overlooked in Gmail, especially when subject lines are similar or the same, as they would be with repeat students. I had other responsibilities in running the day-to-day operations of the writing center and could not let asynchronous online tutoring take over my life, and the rest of our staff is busy as well. I knew that, for our context, we needed a more structured and restrictive system.

[6] The next platform I considered was a learning management system (LMS), which on our campus is Canvas and which I had already been using for several years as an instructor. Nearly every course and instructional cohort has its own Canvas space, with many of the kinds of tools we would be looking for, so I explored ways we might use Canvas as our asynchronous online tutoring platform. Working with our campus’s instructional technology unit, perhaps a tailor-made module could be made available to students on the homepage of any course’s space. Canvas enables instructors or other designated users to collect student work and provide online commentary, communicate in discussion boards, engage in online conferences, and send audio messages to anyone in the course or with access to the space (see Figure 1). Practically all students would already be familiar with Canvas and know how to log in and reach the service, and yet only students in certain classes (or all classes) would be able to access the service, providing the writing center with automatic data on which courses students were visiting from, perhaps enabling us to link back to course material, and reducing the possibilities of non-students making use of the service. Barring that, if the instructional technology unit was unable or unwilling to link the writing center directly to Canvas, we could have created an organizational space for the writing center, much like a course’s page.

​[7] A serious constraint we would have faced here, however, would have been the level of control and access ceded to the office of instructional technology or instructors and TAs who might see themselves as arbiters of policy or writing center procedures. Furthermore, if we had created an organizational space on our own, we would have become overwhelmed by the time and effort it would have taken to manually enter students and other users by their emails (see Figure 2), perhaps from certain classes’ rosters, and then invite them to the space and provide instructions on how to access the service. In subsequent semesters, the number of students and other users of the space would become increasingly unwieldy, unless we went in and manually purged users from past semesters. Also, unless we found a way to connect our appointment system to Canvas, then we would be adding one or more steps and interfaces for students participating in asynchronous sessions, and each of these additional inconveniences would burden me and our staff, and possibly limit student usage of the system. Ultimately, using an LMS like Canvas, despite my own and our students’ familiarity with it, would have involved an unmanageable increase in administrative work.

[8] The last platform we considered was our online scheduling system, WCOnline, which we already pay a yearly subscription for. I was initially resistant to using WCOnline because I was still concerned about possibly limiting the service to students in certain classes, and without closely monitoring the schedule and manually canceling appointments or blocking certain students, I could not see a way to limit the service with WCOnline, and those steps seemed especially passive-aggressive. On the other hand, in addition to using it as our scheduler for many years, we had also already been using the platform WCOnline makes available for “online” tutoring, which is a synchronous modality, so once again, for our writing center at least, keeping all of our services located in one online space and limiting the number of interfaces students, tutors, and administrators would have to log in to were priorities. I knew that WCOnline offers options to make tutors available for face-to-face, online (synchronous), and what they call e-tutoring (asynchronous) appointments (see Figure 3).

[9] Specific tutors, or all tutors, could be made available for e-tutoring and be marked as such, or an entirely separate schedule could be created for all online tutoring, or just for asynchronous online tutoring (see Figure 4).

​[10] A feature of WCOnline enables students to attach documents to an appointment, so tutors can download student drafts and then return comments on that document, a different document, or through some other medium right back to the appointment for the student to later log back into and retrieve the tutor’s advice. The benefits of such a setup are numerous. The center’s scheduling and online tutoring services are kept in one place with one log-in. Students, after making an appointment, don’t need to log into a different interface to access the platform, send their work, or retrieve tutor advice. Centers don’t have to provide links, complicated instructions, or directions to different platforms. Students’ past work and appointments can be made accessible to tutors for review, in order to provide progressive or scaffolded advice. The work is archived in the platform, easily accessed as long as the student can log-in with the same password for later review, and any data a center may want to collect on numbers of appointments and other demographic data is also maintained and accessible through WCOnline.

[11] I ultimately put aside any ideas about restricting the service to students in specific classes, and WCOnline is the platform we now use for asynchronous online tutoring, but we have discovered some drawbacks and obstacles to this model, some of which we have been able to overcome or correct, and some we have not yet. Before we began using different schedules for face-to-face, synchronous online, and asynchronous e-tutoring-- and, frankly, since then as well--there has been confusion among students about the type of appointment, the type of tutoring, they have signed up for. Even with all of our efforts to describe what each type of tutoring entails, students still express some confusion about the terms “synchronous” and “asynchronous.” This confusion has led to some students failing to attach documents to the appointment in time for the session and to a total loss of that tutoring time. All things considered, however, the benefits and convenience for our staff and students make WCOnline our preferred platform at this time.

[12] All centers that implement asynchronous online tutoring will have to decide on a platform to collect student work and deliver advice or suggestions from staff back to students. Questions to consider include the following:

• What does your writing center need from a platform?
• Do you want the platform to include tools for responding to student work or just to collect student requests?
• Do you need the platform to filter users or offer any restrictions on how or how often students can use the service?
• Are you or another member of your center’s staff willing and able to monitor the platform to see that work is distributed fairly and all student requests are responded to in a timely manner?
• Is there an existing tool that your writing center or campus already uses that will meet some or all of the needs you have of a platform?
• Are funds available to pay for a new platform?
• Is the creation of a new, "in-house” platform a possibility?

[13] Various platforms and tools exist but one thing each center should aim to do, if possible, is to use a tool that is already familiar to, or at least readily accessible to, all students that would potentially be served by that center. Principle 1 from the Conference for College Composition and Communication Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction (2013) stated, “Online writing instruction should be universally inclusive and accessible.” Indeed, the entire point of online writing instruction or tutoring should be to make education and student support universally inclusive and accessible, but choosing a platform is not just a matter of inclusion—it is also a matter of logistics.

3. Delivery

[14] As I was trying to determine which platform we would use, I was also considering how we would deliver advice back to students. I knew that comments or track changes can be made in Microsoft Word, and the document can be resent to the student, which would certainly be a convenient option that many students and tutors would already be familiar with and that would not require migrating to a different tool or interfacing with a different platform. Through education and development, I could work with tutors to try and maintain rhetoricity and a balance of directive or non-directive advice in their comments. We could work to keep track changes within the text to a minimum because I worried that some students might ignore comments and suggestions altogether and take advantage of a tutor’s generosity by simply accepting all changes, getting at least some of their grammar corrected—which may have been all they wanted to begin with—without having to engage in the session or consider the tutor’s advice at all. I anticipated that some students and even their instructors might see asynchronous online tutoring as little more than a drop-off service. Indeed, as Cooper, Bui, and Riker (2008) stated, “One could argue that sending a paper online to a tutor can be similar to dropping off dry cleaning” (p. 310). Alternatively, tutors could offer advice primarily in marginal comment boxes, presenting the student with options rather than corrections, but I also thought there may be some potential drawbacks in commenting directly on a student’s document. Tutors might be tempted to “go-to-town” on it, with the best of intentions, and attempt to address each and every thing as they encounter it in the paper, fearing that to ignore anything worthy of a comment would be negligent. This tendency could of course be countered with training, practice, and realistic expectations, but for some it does reflect a concern that asynchronous online tutoring can take more time than face-to-face or synchronous online tutoring.

[15] There is some disagreement about how much time an asynchronous session can or should take, but that also varies depending on a center’s model and expectations; for example, whether tutors are working with an entire paper, as we were aiming to do, or if tutors are only answering a question or working with a short section of writing. Hewett (2015) provided the following framework for time spent on asynchronous sessions:

Generally speaking, an asynchronous conference that responds to a student’s emailed question may take two to ten minutes depending on the question and the response’s language precision and tone. On the other hand, a conference intended to provide formative response to an essay may take about thirty to forty minutes to write if it is the first or second time reading a draft and if we are focusing on the most important issues for revision. (p. 144)

​​Conversely, in a response to a WCenter thread, Nicole Bailey (2016) wrote: “We used to offer asynchronous tutoring, but…we were finding that it took us roughly 4 times as long to work with a distance paper as it did a face-to-face.” From my own experience, and that of our tutors, working with asynchronous online tutoring does take longer than face-to-face tutoring, but again, this undoubtedly depends a great deal on training, expectations, and the methods of scheduling and delivery. Hewett (2015) noted that “These are administrative issues for which effective practices are just beginning to be identified and discussed” (146).

[16] An alternative to responding directly on a student’s text, which I had in mind from my experiences as an online advisor for University of Maryland University College’s Effective Writing Center, was to use a template or rubric, a separate document that requires some consistency in the advice that tutors offer, and enables them to refrain from commenting directly on a student’s paper. Due to demand for all of our services, we made some choices in an attempt to maximize efficiency and consistency in our scheduled hours. Because we opted not to use an email system for asynchronous online tutoring, but rather used the platform through the WCOnline scheduling system, we didn’t intend to respond to individual questions, but instead to entire papers, so we felt guided to hour-long appointments for hour-long sessions that tutors would spend on students’ papers. Offering half-hour appointments might create confusion and unrealistic expectations, I thought, for the work that students could submit. Yes, we might sometimes review a resume or two-page paper for an hour-long session, but that seemed preferable to trying to review an eight-page paper, and its corresponding assignment sheet, in half an hour. I knew we would need to establish some parameters for consistency, not just consistency in advice and the expectations we had of tutors, but consistency in scheduling too. This helped us reach the decision to use a template to deliver advice to students. Instead of commenting directly on a student’s text, we instead provide advice on a prepared form (see Appendix 1). As Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli (2016) stated, “A standard template can frame your response to the student as well as ensure a certain consistency in approach and focus” (p. 92). To clarify a little further, we use a template for several reasons. It allows us, indeed compels us, to take a holistic approach to a student’s writing. Considering several aspects of the writing and responding using the template enables us to prioritize those elements of the paper or assignment we understand to be most important, focusing our advice there, and including links to other resources. We value the template for its formality and for what we have considered its authenticity. There is a visual consistency to the template, and it is clearly from the Writing Center, identifying the tutor by name, with redundancy built in to several sections of the document, pointing out the most important elements of the advice to the student more than once. Variations of a template or rubric are being used at other writing centers. Shannin Schroeder (2016) wrote on WCenter:

We embed a rubric we created at the top of the document that…allows consultants to give an overview of what seems to be working and what’s not going well. Then, they can include comments in the “strengths” and “things to improve” sections of the rubric. More importantly, it helps avoid the sort of error correction that might be tempting in an electronic document…they need to prioritize (as they would during a 30-minute conference) and decide the most important information to give or questions to ask.

​An interesting alternative to written feedback that some writing centers use is screencast technology. It is often free, relatively easy to use, and can help tutors provide feedback faster than they might otherwise strictly in writing. For some, it can be seen as an opportunity to overcome many of the perceived obstacles to maintaining the rhetorical nature of tutoring asynchronously online. Screencast programs like Jing and Screencast-o-Matic allow tutors to record their computer screen and themselves—or just their voice—while directing a viewer’s attention to elements on the screen, like parts of a student’s paper. The programs sometimes come with limits on the length of recordings one can make—often between five and fifteen minutes—which can be beneficial, as it forces tutors to prioritize the elements of the student paper that they will discuss. So, it allows tutors to talk, to be in conversation with the student’s work, and for elements like tone, inflection, and demeanor that are sometimes lost or unclear in written advice to play a larger role in asynchronous advice. Recording screencast advice can be faster and easier than typing and can help tutors resist trying to address everything in a paper. Some of the drawbacks of screencast advice are that some students are, understandably, reluctant to watch a video, and even if they do watch it, they may not want to go back through the video to search for a few valuable pieces of advice or a specific comment, as they could in a document of written advice. Some tutors may be shy about recording their voices, which they may not be used to hearing. I can also attest that when I sometimes record audio or screencast feedback to students, no matter how much effort I make to try and limit my comments, it can be very difficult to limit them to only five or even fifteen minutes.

[17] I continue to consider some drawbacks to our method, especially the use of the template. One is a degree of uncertainty about how students are using the advice. Our hope and expectation is that they are reading it, considering it, and taking steps on their own to then implement the advice into their own writing, but frankly, we just do not know if that is happening as often as we hope, yet. It is also likely, sometimes at least, that we are focusing our advice on areas that the student did not want or feel they needed any help with. Despite our efforts to remain helpful and even conversational whenever possible, I imagine the template can come across as overly formal to some students at times. The template may also be the reason our sessions are taking so much time. Using two different documents—the student’s draft and the template—and asking tutors to offer advice in several sections of the template, along with links to other sources, may be slowing the tutors down. We may soon attempt to streamline the process by having tutors respond in comment boxes directly on student drafts.

[18] Whether your center uses email, an LMS, an online scheduling tool or database, or just about any other platform for collecting student requests for asynchronous online tutoring, you will still need to grapple with questions about how to deliver advice from tutors back to students.

• How much work will you expect the tutors in your center to do for each request?
• How will the delivery method enable tutors to abide by your center’s philosophy of tutoring? How directive or nondirective should their advice be?
• How will the delivery method dovetail with the platform you have chosen? Is the tool already a part of the platform?
• Are you interested in exploring alternative methods to only replying in writing, such as audio messages or screen-casting?
• How will you ensure broad accessibility in the written or video feedback you provide to students? Are there ways to ensure feedback will be accessible to students who may be visually or hearing impaired, who may have learning disabilities, or who have limited access to technology?

4. Training

[19] Regardless of what we decided to use for our platform and delivery method, I knew that staff training and preparation would be another major component of our asynchronous online tutoring service, but I still had questions about what that training would include and how we would conduct it. As OWI Principle 14 stated “Online writing lab administrators and tutors should undergo selection, training, and ongoing professional development activities that match the environment in which they will work” (Conference for College Composition and Communication Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction). This made sense to me, but I was still unsure about when and how we would facilitate that training. In our writing center, a for-credit theory and practice class provides much of our training and tutor education, but I wondered where in an already-busy fifteen-week semester I would find time to devote to asynchronous online tutoring, never mind enough time to fully prepare tutors for this additional modality. Moreover, while we primarily employ undergraduate peer tutors, and since those undergraduates are all required to first complete the course, we are able to get most of our staff on the same page about the processes and policies of our center, but we also employ several professional tutors, graduate students, and volunteers from the community who cannot take the class and therefore do not spend that time on online tutoring. Then of course there were a number of experienced undergraduate tutors who had already completed the course in a previous semester. How would I make time to conduct individual, ongoing training for tutors who were not enrolled in the course? Bell (2011) wrote the following:

Tutor training is not the same face-to-face as online, but there is still the need to read theory and lore, to observe sessions, and to be mentored. Online tutors also need the opportunity to reflect, to review tutorial transcripts and make adjustments that bring them more in line with the theoretical foundations of their writing center’s work. (p. 331)

​This was helpful to me. Initially, at least, just as we did for synchronous online tutor training, we could read a handful of essays (some quoted in this chapter); engage in mock sessions with one another, both synchronously and asynchronously through the actual platforms used in our center; reflect on the process in online discussion boards; and discuss the experience in class. In addition to the required theory and practice course we offer each semester, we designed, and sometimes offer, a variable-credit advanced course devoted to online tutoring, functioning more like an independent study, where we are able to spend significant time on both the synchronous and asynchronous modality, with teaching duties split up among our administrative team.

[20] Just as I knew that training would not be the same for asynchronous tutoring, I labored over ideas of how we would respond to student work in writing, how this would be addressed in training, and how we would maintain our philosophy of tutoring. In our writing center, we have always tried to strike a balance between directive and non-directive tutoring, striving for flexibility and adaptability in different situations. There is some research here which we can turn to as a point of comparison. Studies have found that, in traditional face-to-face tutoring, students actually appreciate the non-directive, question- and conversation-based nature of sessions (Harris, 1995, p. 30-32). On the other hand, studies have also found that from asynchronous online tutoring sessions, students express dissatisfaction and confusion over tutors responding with questions rather than answers or suggestions (Hewett, 2015, p. 114-115; Rafoth, 2009, p. 149). In asynchronous online tutoring, we lack the opportunities for conversation and back and forth questioning. Other than what they have “said” in the draft, we can’t, as Jeff Brooks (2008) suggested, “get the student to talk” (p. 171). We then can’t hedge as we might in a face-to-face session (“Um, I don’t know, what do you think? It’s your paper”). In “Responding Online,” a chapter more directly focused on tutoring ESL writers online, but still applicable for our purposes, Rafoth (2009) suggested that, “Less is more when it comes to writing comments…Focus and consistency are paramount…Direct but polite feedback is regarded as most helpful” (p. 149). The steps that other individual writing centers take to maintain their tutoring philosophy in asynchronous online tutoring is obviously up to them to determine, based on the expectations those centers, their students, and campus expect, but this will also require questions and decisions as the service is being implemented. Training will likely look and feel at least somewhat differently to training and development for face-to-face tutoring, and as much as possible, that training should immerse staff in the settings and interfaces that they will use when they actually tutor. Indeed, training should, again as much as possible, provide tutors with the same vantage point that students they tutor will see. Mock or practice sessions utilizing the real platform are also a good idea, exposing tutors to the real work they will do in a low-stakes setting, followed by reflection on the experience, giving them an opportunity to voice concerns, suggest improvements or alterations, and share tips and successes.

[21] Regardless of the size or makeup of your staff, implementing this new service will almost certainly require many hours of engagement with pedagogy as well as practice and reflection on work done in this specific modality. Consider your needs, context and what is available to you.

• Will your entire staff be tutoring asynchronously online, or only a select group?
• Do you have existing training? Can your current training and staff education methods be modified for or to include asynchronous online tutoring?
• Do you offer an online tutor training course, and can guidelines for asynchronous online tutoring be part of that course?
• Can training take place over a day or several days at the beginning of the semester?
• Is the size of your staff manageable enough that you are able to have weekly staff meetings to engage in training, or where training can be followed up on, in-person or online?
• Are there opportunities for ongoing, on-the-job training?

As Harris and Pemberton (2001) wrote, “Directors have to see tutor preparation as part of building successful OWLs” (p. 538). I would argue that tutor preparation is perhaps the most crucial part, especially in maintaining your center’s philosophy of tutoring, as much as possible, in the new modality.

5. Scheduling

[22] Finally, I grappled with questions of scheduling tutors. I had no idea what to expect in terms of demand for the new service, but because of the size of our university and our large student population, part of me at least worried that demand would be high, and as I have mentioned, early on I was wrestling with the possibility of restricting the service to students in certain classes. Depending on the platform and delivery method we ultimately used, as well as the demand we experienced, decisions on scheduling were also important. If demand had ended up being relatively small, and if, for example, we elected to use email as our method and found that requests would often be quick question/answer or rather short paragraphs to look at and respond to, then perhaps having a looser “whoever-gets-to-it-first” schedule would work, or assigning one person to monitor the inbox each day (whichever days we decided to offer responses to students) would provide adequate coverage and divide responsibilities up evenly among staff. For our campus, with a larger staff, and a likely greater demand for the service, imposing limits or clearer restrictions through the schedule was going to be necessary. This led to our decision to use WCOnline, our usual scheduler, as our platform and, therefore, scheduling tool for asynchronous online tutoring as well. We opted not to make every single tutor available to tutor asynchronously for every one of their scheduled hours. We made a separate schedule and only made certain, specially-trained tutors available for certain hours. The separate schedule leads to, we hope, greater intentionality on the student’s part. We assume that if they are required to manually click on a schedule for asynchronous online tutoring, then they will have a better sense of what they are participating in, or at least research it a bit before their session is scheduled to begin. The hours that we offer for asynchronous online tutoring are then, of course, limited.

[23] Another important question I considered was whether or not to allow tutors to work remotely, or to require them to be onsite at the center. Since the work is done asynchronously, and we decided that advice should be returned to students within a twenty-four-hour window, did the tutors need to be present during our regular business hours, and did we really need them working at a certain time every day, under our watchful supervision? Dave Healy (1995), in a rare, early article that considered some of the administrative implications of asynchronous online tutoring, presented the following argument:

Unless a writing center director could argue that the online consulting Talia does from the center during office hours is demonstrably better than what she provides from a remote site, it seems somewhat arbitrary and capricious to limit her consulting to the 15 hours a week when she is scheduled to be physically present in the center. (p. 187)

​I wondered whether this new service could actually offer us the benefit of some scheduling flexibility, or would allowing tutors to work offsite set a troublesome precedent or other set of problems we could not anticipate? In some semesters, we had experienced tutors we really would have liked to retain, but whose other responsibilities and class schedules kept them from tutoring as often as we had hoped, or at all. Allowing them to tutor remotely could have solved that problem. The same would be true for our tutors who left to study abroad. Rather than lose them for the entire semester, we might let them tutor remotely, where the distance and time difference would not keep them from working with the center. On the other hand, I thought, would it not just be easier to have all tutors complete all work onsite, during regular hours? This would mean that an administrator or fellow tutor would be available to provide answers or advice for particularly complex assignments or questions that a tutor might encounter in a request for asynchronous online tutoring, providing more opportunities for tutors to discuss their experiences and the work that they are doing. It might also give me a better sense of the work that tutors were doing asynchronously, how long it was taking and how they were managing their time. With all tutors onsite, they could also be given other tasks to complete around the center when they are not tutoring asynchronously.

[24] Ultimately, we allowed tutors to work remotely, and discovered that allowance served as an incentive for tutors who were anxious or reluctant to join in the new service. While this would not be an option for writing centers that already operate fully online, for a brick-and-mortar writing center such as ours, the opportunity to tutor remotely outside of the center’s regular business hours was a powerful recruitment tool for us during the summer when we need online tutors the most, since the majority of classes are only offered online but many of our tutors leave campus, sometimes to go out of state, or are only looking for full-time opportunities—which we cannot give them—during the long break. Once we tell them they can tutor from, for example, Minnesota or anywhere else at 2:00 in the morning, we suddenly get more interest for tutoring hours during the summer.

[25] Regardless of which platform or method your center uses to provide asynchronous online tutoring services, and whichever other tools you use, if any, decisions about scheduling and how/when to make that tutoring available will still need to be made, and again, a set of questions should be considered to help you make those decisions:

• How much of a demand do you anticipate your writing center will see for asynchronous online tutoring?
• How will the platform and delivery method you have chosen to use affect scheduling your staff?
• Have you elected to impose restrictions on who can use the service and how often?
• Will you make every member of your staff available for asynchronous online tutoring or only a select few?
• Do you already use an online scheduler like WCOnline or TutorTrac?
• Are you open to allowing tutors to work remotely, or should they complete all work onsite at the center?
• Will you allow tutors to work outside of the center’s regular business hours, overnight or on weekends?

We have heard from writing centers at some of our peer institutions who, in the quest to help as many students as possible, feel an obligation to make all of their tutors available for asynchronous tutoring, and to accept practically every request that comes through. That is obviously up to them, but in reality, all of our services and resources are finite. Few of us offer 24/7 face-to-face tutoring with the same number of tutors every shift in our centers. We, as well as our students and institutions, just have to accept that asynchronous online tutoring services are finite as well.

6. Conclusion

[26] In the year since we started offering asynchronous online tutoring, we have developed a system that, mostly, works for us and our context. We make appointments and collect student work through WCOnline on a separate, dedicated asynchronous online tutoring schedule with a group of tutors who have undergone additional training and deliver advice on a template, with a clear, but ever-evolving set of guidelines for both students and tutors. We have continued to adapt our promotion of the service and appointment form (see Figure 5) in order to make the logistics clearer to students and we also update the template and guidelines to make our expectations clearer and easier to manage. We still encounter students who are unclear about what they need to do for each of our online tutoring modalities or about how their sessions will be conducted, and our tutors still struggle with time. We are actively exploring screencast technology and moving to a more streamlined system of commenting directly on student texts.

[27] While we strive to improve the model for both student usability and tutor labor, the apparent successes of the system, in addition to the aims of the service itself, outweigh the ongoing challenges. Carlson & Apperson-Williams (2008) stated the following:

The premises of online tutoring are noble—to improve access to campus writing centers and to narrow distances between students and tutors. Time constraints, proximity, and introverted personalities often keep students from attending tutoring sessions. Computer technology can bring students and tutors closer together, overcoming the distance that may exist. (p. 285)

​When we set out to offer our asynchronous service, I also hoped, admittedly based primarily on assumption at that point, that our asynchronous online tutoring would also offer a wider range of options to students with certain learning styles or would better serve students with some learning or physical disabilities. It is now time to learn more about what we are actually accomplishing in these sessions.

[28] Last spring, we surveyed students and tutors who had participated in asynchronous online tutoring up to that point in the semester. Though we only received a small number of responses from students, those responses were overwhelmingly positive, with students commenting on the convenience of receiving written feedback from the tutor without having to be present during the session, and almost unanimously agreeing that their “needs were fully met” by the session and the tutor’s advice. Interestingly, most of the students who responded to the survey had never visited the center for face-to-face appointments. Likewise, the responses we received from tutors were heartening. Generally speaking, they liked the scheduling flexibility that it afforded themselves and students, and they were enthusiastic about the advice they could offer students in writing, and the fact that the advice was archived for students to return to as needed. Our next steps will be to take a much closer, long-term look at the advice tutors are writing, and how it compares to what we assume, and say, they are providing in face-to-face and synchronous online sessions. We will ask students for help in determining how effective they have found the advice and how they are, or are not, able to apply it to different writing contexts over time. We are also very interested in learning more about why students are choosing asynchronous sessions, and if we are really serving the populations we set out to serve, for the reasons we anticipated.

[29] Although the amount of available scholarship was limited when we were exploring, planning, and first piloting asynchronous online tutoring in our writing center, in recent years the amount of work on asynchronous online tutoring has grown. Denise Rogers (2014), in “Our First Steps in Establishing an Online Writing Lab at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette” discussed her work at implementing online tutoring, which ended up being an asynchronous service. In their chapter “Online Writing Labs,” Diane Martinez and Leslie Olsen (2015) provided descriptions and recommendations for both asynchronous and synchronous tutoring modalities. Kathryn Denton (2017) in “Beyond the Lore: A Case for Asynchronous Online Tutoring Research” called for research into asynchronous online tutoring as a prime opportunity to combat criticisms of writing center policies and pedagogies as being based on anecdote and assumption. In “Writer L1/L2 Status and Asynchronous Online Writing Center Feedback: Consultant Response Patterns,” Josh Weirick, Tracy Davis, and Daniel Lawson (2017) examined the differences in comments that consultants provided for L1 and L2 in asynchronous online advice and what that could mean for tutor training. Cristyn Elder (2017), in “Dear OWL Mail: Centering Writers’ Concerns in Online Tutor Preparation,” conducted a study into the questions and concerns writers submitted about their writing, and what can be drawn from the results to better prepare online tutors. Interest in the field is growing, as is awareness of its potential and need for research.

[30] As a field or discipline, writing centers need to work together to develop a framework for asynchronous online tutoring, with more research and scholarship, particularly qualitative research on the usability of platforms, the efficacy of advice and delivery, and staff labor. One of the greatest strengths of the writing center community has always been that very sense of community, the spirit of generosity, cooperation, and collaboration that enabled the field to grow, and so whether as a field of writing center studies or as an academic support service, the larger community of writing centers needs to have conversations about how we are approaching asynchronous online tutoring, and we need research into methods that best enable tutors to do their jobs, and into the processes and policies that most effectively serve students’ needs. Those methods, processes, and policies will vary from context to context, and though we cannot develop a one-size-fits-all model, we can establish a framework based on research that can be adapted to any writing center, or at least used as a starting point.

7. References