1. Introduction

[1] Growth for most writing centers is often celebrated. Directors can point to increased interest from students and faculty in order to secure more funding or operational resources. Growth can also present unique challenges that extend beyond hiring additional staff or staying open for longer hours. Athens State University recently launched several online graduate degrees that all feature substantial amounts of writing as a part of their coursework. The Writing Center at Athens State University has had to meet the challenges of this growth through altering its online consulting practices and growing new services specifically for graduate students completing their coursework fully online. While existing literature covers a wide range of topics related to online tutoring, little research explores the role of online tutoring in relation to graduate studies. Such a gap needs to be addressed in order to provide new methods of writing support for the growing number of online graduate students in higher education.

[2] This article begins with some context about our campus, writing center, and student population. We provide a review of literature that focuses on onsite tutoring of graduate students and online tutoring theory and practice. We draw from these two strands of scholarship in order to provide changes in how writing centers can approach working with online graduate learners. Next, we present changes in the pre-published resources that our center offers to online graduate students. Finally, we present a set of policy alterations enacted during the Fall 2018 semester. We have created new policies that better reflect student need and have altered our practices for individual interaction with graduate learners.

1.1. Background and Context

[3] Athens State University is a two-year university in northern Alabama that primarily services upper-division students and supports and hosts some coursework from a variety of institutions in the region. As of 2018, total undergraduate enrollment was just over 3,000 students. Over the past several years, Athens State has launched three graduate degrees: an M.S. in Global Logistics and Supply Chain Management, an M.A. in Religious Studies, and an M.Ed. in Career and Technical Education. These three graduate programs were all launched as fully online degrees in order to cater to a large population of returning learners and to serve a wide range of learners in the region. Each of these degree programs features a large amount of writing as a part of the coursework, regardless of whether students opt for a thesis or capstone project. The relatively immediate need for advanced-writing ability has been a stumbling block for many students, particularly those who have been immersed in workplace cultures and literacies that do not align with the staples of graduate education like literature reviews and research methods. This has prompted discussion across our campus on how to improve support for these new online learners, particularly our graduate students, and these conversations have increasingly involved the Writing Center.

[4] The Athens State University Writing Center is small, presenting a unique set of challenges for expanding services to new degree programs. In the 2017-2018 academic year, our Center employed four undergraduate consultants that participated in 518 individual consultations with 231 unique clients. Only 1% of the total visits came from graduate students that academic year despite an increased awareness that our graduate students were facing difficulties in writing projects. Some potential explanations are clear. Our graduate programs are online, meaning students have missed much of our traditional marketing in the form of flyers, classroom visits, and word of mouth referrals from other students. Many of the students pursuing our graduate degrees are also nontraditional, and some research suggests that students from less prepared academic backgrounds are skeptical of online tutorial services due to their perceived lack of benefit or their own discomfort with technology (Okwumabua et al., 2010).

[5] In addition to these issues, our Writing Center’s size also plays an important role in relation to the services we offer. In “Writing Centers in the Small College,” Byron L. Stay (2016) notes that few writing center researchers have explored the challenges faced by writing centers on small campuses. Frequently, such centers can become overwhelmed when new programs are formed on campus, and a center can be quickly left behind when a new program receives a surge of faculty and resources (p. 147). Stay (2016) describes a moment at the Mount St. Mary’s Writing Center where an influx of second language learners swamped the center’s ability to staff tutors with specific backgrounds in ELL pedagogies (p. 149). Similarly, Athens State University has experienced quick growth in graduate programs while the Writing Center has had to catch up on training and support.

[6] Our Writing Center differs from many in relation to modality and student demographics. Our session numbers and unique client visits have increased for undergraduate and graduate students, but this increase has been in online sessions, and our face-to-face sessions have decreased steadily since 2013. During our summer 2018 operations, 90% of our 110 appointments were online, and most of those students were enrolled in online courses. In short, our Writing Center has transitioned from a mostly onsite entity to a mostly online entity in a short span of time. We also serve a population of almost exclusively first-language learners (in our summer semester, only one student identified as a second-language learner). Our context is significant because a majority of writing center scholarship has focused on L2 learners pursuing graduate degrees in onsite contexts. We believe our work with online students is crucial in addressing these gaps. In his introduction to the recent edited collection Supporting Graduate Student Writers, Steve Simpson (2016) identified the lack of research outside of L2 graduate students as one of the main priorities for scholars exploring writing support (p. 10).

[7] Our Writing Center currently offers synchronous, asynchronous, and onsite tutoring for graduate students. The Athens State University Writing Center has never offered asynchronous tutoring to students at any level, partly to discourage the idea of being an editing service. The majority of our graduate students are learning in asynchronous environments with some synchronous components like real-time lectures or virtual office hours. Diane Martinez and Leslie Olsen (2015) argued that students should be able to receive academic support in the same format in which they are learning, which prompted our Center to begin offering asynchronous tutoring via email to graduate students. Due to our current operational constraints, we are unable to extend this service to all of our learners, but we hope to use data we accumulate over the coming semesters to ask for staff increases in order to expand services.

[8] The changes happening on our campus are, in a way, a microcosm of how many schools are responding to decreasing enrollments. Online graduate programs are growing considerably now as schools pursue populations that have previously eluded traditional marketing (Caplan & Cox, 2016, p. 40). What is happening in our Center is likely going to happen across the U.S. and other countries if current trends continue, and our work here will begin to expand conversations related to writing support for online graduate students.

2. Literature Review: Onsite Graduate Tutoring

[9] In “Writing Center Support for Graduate Students: An Integrated Model,” Talinn Phillips (2013) observed the difficulty that many writing centers have with assisting graduate students: “Since many institutions are undergraduate-only, those of us who work with graduate students are already a subset of the field. Even among writing centers that work with graduate students, the field seems to have not yet (or perhaps only just) begun to articulate meaningful differences between undergraduate and graduate writing and between the needs of undergraduate and graduate writers in terms of a writing center” (p. 159). Much of the lore and standard practices in many writing centers are not compatible with the demands of graduate education. Phillips (2016) found that the typical sessions in writing centers that run 20-30 minutes are not long enough for staff to work through a whole paper. This forces graduate students to schedule multiple sessions with different staff members on the same project, complicating the work of a standard session (p. 162).

[10] Staffing a traditional writing center is difficult enough without having to consider academic levels and disciplinary backgrounds. Phillips further explains that graduate students

often needed and wanted more expert tutors than the undergraduate writing center provided. They wanted tutors who had experience with specialized genres like grants, articles, theses, and dissertations. Undergraduate tutors could provide graduate writers with some help in these genres, but that help was generally quite limited. Moreover, some graduate writers simply didn’t believe that undergraduate tutors were capable of helping them. No matter how qualified or well trained our undergraduate tutors were, they couldn’t escape their undergraduate ethos problem: Some graduate writers simply didn’t trust them. (Phillips, 2016, p. 162)

​These realities complicate much of the standard work of most writing centers, necessitating further research on the state of graduate writing.

[11] A recent collection titled Supporting Graduate Student Writers (2016) has broken important ground on writing in graduate programs. In “The State of Graduate Communication Support: Results of an International Study,” Nigel A. Caplan and Michelle Cox detail the results of their survey of 270 graduate programs. They found that graduate student writing support existed most commonly in writing centers, and that most writing centers combined both undergraduate and graduate tutoring. Less commonly, centers hired separate, specialized staff to conduct tutoring sessions with graduate students (Caplan & Cox, 2016, p. 26-27). While many writing centers do serve graduate student populations, there are significant barriers to doing so such as consultant hiring, training for graduate support, and student population. In addition to regular tutoring/consulting sessions, the survey also found that workshops are a common feature for graduate support, and that these workshops are often standalone entities (Caplan & Cox, 2016, p. 30).

[12] The authors note that a significant problem affecting graduate writing support is fragmentation. Typically, campuses have centralized support for undergraduate learning such as omnibus tutoring services. Support for graduate students is often diffuse and perhaps located in several places, which is an issue when trying to build a support system (Caplan & Cox, 2016, p. 38-39). These problems are significant and growing as demand “for master’s programs is growing faster than doctoral programs” (Caplan & Cox, 2016, p. 40). Further, there is significant debate on how writing centers can actually help graduate students. In “Graduate Writing Instruction: A Cautionary Tale,” Christine Jensen Sundstrom (2016) explains that graduate students are often caught in an invisible web of curriculum that is not overtly taught in courses, but is vital to the success of students (p. 193).

[13] Graduate students are writing to different audiences than undergraduates, and centers should provide some specialized training for staff working with graduate students. In “Tutor Training and Services for Multilingual Graduate Writers: A Reconsideration,” Talinn Phillips (2013) interviewed several multilingual graduate writers about their experiences working with undergraduate tutors in a writing center. The resulting interviews were complex. Many of the graduate students understood the desire of the undergraduate staff to move away from sentence-level issues, but those students also needed a zoomed-in approach to working through their writing. Advanced writers understand that writing often involves sentence-level concerns; articles, conference proposals, grant applications, cover letters, and CVs all benefit (and succeed) based on attention to grammar, syntax, and delivery (para. 28). One of the graduate students in Phillips's study distinguished between sentence level issues and voice or tone, noting that an undergraduate tutor could help to spot grammar errors, but would not be able to provide feedback on how well the graduate writer was meeting the discursive requirements of graduate-level writing (para. 6).

2.1. Online Tutoring

[14] A number of writing centers have made the transition to providing online writing instruction, and these online writing labs (OWLs) provide a large array of services to students. The OWLs provide some form of tutoring, whether that comes in the form of synchronous tutoring using an online communication technology or asynchronous tutoring that relies on email or some other software, and they frequently employ staff to provide feedback on student writing. These online student support services are necessary for the success of online learners, especially when face-to-face students often have these opportunities (Martinez & Olsen, 2015, pp. 184-185). Martinez and Olsen (2015) argue that inclusivity concerns should be the driving force behind online tutorial access and that writing centers should strive for parity in services offered (p. 187).

[15] Despite the increased availability of suitable technologies for online tutoring, writing centers have been slow to adopt new methods and services for online learners. Stephen Neaderhiser and Joanna Wolfe (2009) conducted a survey of writing centers and found that the dominant technology for online tutoring was email, and only 10% of online conferencing was synchronous (p. 60). In the centers that indicated they used synchronous online tutoring, no one technology was dominant, and staff used mixed methods in order to communicate with students (Neaderhiser & Wolfe, 2009 pg. 60-65). Despite a rise in the prominence of online teaching, institutions have been slow to provide online student support. Neaderhiser & Wolfe (2009) found that 75 percent of writing centers surveyed received no additional funding or support for online tutoring (p. 65). According to Kristen Blair and Cheryl Hoy (2006), establishing online support systems for students are often perceived as one-time expenses or investments that would not need funding for ongoing maintenance (p. 65). Unsurprisingly, there is a noted lack of staff and training in many writing centers for online tutoring. Blair and Hoy (2006) found that very few writing centers had staff specifically devoted to online tutoring (p. 65).

[16] Martinez and Olsen (2015) argue that tutors need specialized training in order to move from onsite to online consultations (p. 200). Blair and Hoy (2006) found no consensus in their survey on preparation or training for writing center staff conducting online consultations. Some respondents indicated that all tutors would work online, while others responded that only graduate students with a full year of writing center experience would work with online sessions (p. 67). According to Martinez and Olsen (2015), students would approach online student support with varying levels of technological familiarity, necessitating that staff have at least some level of technology proficiency and be able to assist students with technological concerns or troubleshooting in sessions. Aside from troubleshooting, staff need to understand the tools they are using so they can inform students about the kind of instruction they would receive (p. 201). Even experienced onsite tutors may not recognize the differences between tutoring onsite and tutoring online. Requiring less experienced tutors to interact with students in online tutoring can negatively affect the experiences of staff and student learners (Martinez & Olsen, 2015, p. 198).

[17] Despite negative perceptions, several studies have confirmed the benefits of online tutoring. Kathryn Denton (2017) found that tutors and students felt their interactions were personal and overall beneficial, which contradicts an oft-repeated complaint about the impersonal nature of digital technologies and their impact on interactions in tutoring (p. 197). Joanna Wolfe and Jo Ann Griffin (2012) conducted a study comparing tutor and student perceptions in online sessions and found that online conferencing produced similar results to onsite tutoring. Further, and most importantly, they “found no significant differences in our expert raters’ perceptions of instructional quality of the sessions; moreover, participants were equally satisfied with the consultations regardless of environment” (p. 83). Wolfe and Griffin (2012) also surveyed participants on their preference for tutoring modality and found that over half of the students surveyed indicated their preference for online sessions while only one staff member indicated a preference for online. Consultants indicated a general concern about the effectiveness of online meetings, and this concern was not shared by student participants (p. 84). Despite evidence to the contrary, many writing centers remain wary of online tutoring, and Blair and Hoy (2006) found that residential colleges were dropping support for online tutoring due to lack of student interest.

[18] Several scholars have also identified some of the barriers to successful online tutoring. While online tutoring can provide benefits for students, problems with technological access can still hinder students. Beth Hewett (2015) observed that students may be participating in online learning and conferencing, but that does not mean they have equitable internet access. These students may be working from home on older hardware, or using institutions like libraries for access. These institutions may not be adequate for the work of online writing courses or conferences (p. 14). Aside from access concerns, students may also lack experience with educational technology and interacting with instructional or academic support via electronic methods. This can lead to an overall skepticism and avoidance of online interaction (pp. 15-22). In addition, synchronous online tutoring can provide barriers to students with some disabilities. Online tutoring software often privileges text as the primary mode of interaction, which necessitates that centers be aware of methods to accommodate diverse learners (p. 35).

[19] Researchers have also explored online tutoring for adult learners, and found some strategies helpful for accommodating those learners. Adult learners may be less familiar with self-directed learning and less comfortable with active participation in learning environments. Such students may be more comfortable in face-to-face courses where the student could be physically present but intellectually absent (Blair & Hoy, 2006, p. 37). These prior experiences can shape the way that adult and returning learners approach their sessions in OWLs. While they may lack familiarity with active learning models online,

[Adult learners] are more likely to be highly motivated, in part because they understand the importance of what they are learning and are making deliberate choices to be in higher education classes. Anecdotal experience suggests that older adult students are ready to learn to write well because they see that life circumstances require that skill. (Gos, 2015, p. 322)

​Despite some commonalities, adult learners can be difficult to classify or generalize. Blair and Hoy (2006) found that some “adult learner students had difficulties with writing for an academic audience, and with organization, development, conciseness, syntax, or grammar” while others “completed the assignments and the course quickly with a minimum of peer and instructor responses” (p. 42). Blair and Hoy argue their findings necessitate the need for individualized instruction for adult and returning learners who make up the majority our graduate students (p. 42).

3. Pre-published Resources

[20] Our research has prompted a series of changes in how we support our online graduate learners. One of the most common requests from faculty members has been for new resources for our graduate students. As our graduate programs launched and began to grow, we audited our existing learning support resources. We found a large amount (several filing cabinets worth) of worksheets, citation guides, and quick reference sheets on topics like grammar, organization, research, and argument. Our pre-published resources were written and assembled over time, but they reflected an emphasis on face-to-face sessions with undergraduate students, and there were no existing resources for graduate students. Further, our campus had no existing resources for graduate learners--even our library lacked books and other resources for this student population because it was so new.

[21] Our Writing Center did have a set of published library guides that were written in 2012. Our records indicate these resources were designed over time by a variety of individuals, and some of those individuals did not work in the center as they were composing the guides. The early library guides were a one-time investment, and funding to create the guides came from an internal quality assessment plan, which reflects the reality of some OWL resources. Our resulting guides were outdated and did not match our program needs. Blair and Hoy (2006) observed this trend and found that such resources need consistent support over time (p. 65).

[22] These guides were live and accessible through our library page since they had been created, and they had not been edited since shortly after they were made. The guides were mostly used to house collections of links to books, other library guides, or other OWLs. The edits were focused on adding more resources and links to books. The guides had been neglected long enough for the original code to become distorted, giving them an odd appearance, and they took on the role of our filing cabinets, serving as digital repositories of handouts and links.

[23] Our immediate concern for pre-published resources was creating a public-facing set of guides for graduate students. During informal discussions with faculty and students, our staff frequently heard the misconception that the Writing Center did not provide services for graduate students. We decided that the library guides would become an important part of our marketing strategy to faculty and graduate students to help dispel this rumor. Our first step in revising the guides was to meet with faculty and ask about writing. We informally surveyed faculty across three colleges and heard that students are struggling with topic selection, interpreting sources, introductions, conclusions, and revisions. These concerns are shared by our faculty about undergraduate writers, but there was a general sense of frustration about the lack of materials available specifically for graduate students.

[24] In response to faculty concerns, we created a new set of library guides that are written with graduate students in mind. Our M.A. in Religious Studies features a large amount of writing that involves textual interpretation and responding to the textual interpretations of other scholars in the field. The faculty identified that most students lack the ability to interact with source material in nuanced ways; therefore, we developed a library guide that instructs students on how to interact with source material.

[25] Our guide begins with a video tutorial produced by our writing center that includes various examples that mirror the concepts described in text. We found that our graduate courses were text-heavy, and faculty welcomed the opportunity to include some content in video format. We subtitled the video in order to accommodate diverse learner needs. The video is under 10 minutes, which was specifically requested by several faculty that plan to include these resources as supplemental instruction. Immediately after the video, we wrote a short description in order to signal that these sources were constructed explicitly for graduate students.

[26] Deciding what content would ultimately be featured in the guides was difficult. Many of our graduate courses feature embedded library staff that help students with navigating databases, finding sources, and producing reference pages. We choose to specifically focus on textual concerns to complement the work of our librarians.

[27] Our guides are meant to function as quick references rather than substantial instructional tools. Our strategy is to provide multiple interventions for students during the writing process while also encouraging writing center use. The guide for graduate students has been active during the Fall 2018 semester and has been viewed consistently since its publication. Out of 68 active guides for the entire campus, our resource page for graduate students ranks #15 in total views. Prior to these revisions, the writing center guides were ranked last in our list, which has shown us that demand for these resources exists on the campus.

4. Student Needs

[28] Graduate students need to know we exist before they can utilize our resources, but reaching graduate students directly has been an ongoing challenge. Lori Salem (2016) surveyed an incoming class of over 4,000 undergraduate students and found that their intention to seek out tutoring resources was in place before they arrived on campus, meaning recruiting students through traditional marketing methods is likely less effective than center professionals would like to believe (p. 155). We have informally confirmed this effect in conversations with graduate students. While we do not have the same breadth of data that Salem collected, we know from qualitative studies (Phillips, 2016) that graduate students are often uncomfortable in writing centers due to perceptions about undergraduate tutoring expertise. For centers serving traditional undergraduate populations, there are a variety of mechanisms in place for growth including campus visits, attending orientation activities, and producing various paper goods and posters. These methods cannot be easily transferred to online environments. At present, our school does not require a physical orientation for our online students, and each program handles new students in different ways. One example is our College of Business. They conducted a virtual orientation during the Fall 2018 semester, and our Writing Center participated in the session, but there were issues with scheduling due to the fact that most of our graduate students are working and have family obligations. The orientation session ultimately happened after hours, which required more flexibility on the part of the center staff.

[29] Another way that we have altered our marketing practices to graduate students in the Fall 2018 semester is by creating resources for online graduate courses that can be embedded directly into Blackboard course shells. Like many writing centers, we have relied on the "syllabus blurb" to inform many students of our services, but our internal data has not indicated that the blurb is translating into new client visits, especially for graduate students. We now offer a “virtual syllabus blurb” that can be embedded within any graduate course.

[30] Students most frequently cite instructor recommendations as the main vehicle that brings them to our Writing Center. In order to help translate this to online courses, we recommend that faculty place our blurb as near to writing projects as possible in the course shell.

[31] These efforts are a part of a larger move to translate existing methods of print and onsite marketing to digital arenas. Our Writing Center has maintained a small marketing budget that has historically been invested in traditional marketing materials. These flyers were distributed throughout campus and handed out at several events throughout the academic year.

[32] Our Writing Center heavily relied on these types of traditional concepts to market our services, utilizing the familiar higher-order and lower-order vocabulary to define our work. These strategies still have a place for us, particularly when we can leave these resources with other campus offices, but we created the virtual syllabus blurb specifically for graduate students. Our decision to forgo using standard writing center language was grounded in our understanding that many of our graduate students do not have prior experiences with writing centers. The updated language in our blurb is specifically targeted to graduate students and the kind of writing they are being asked to complete. We have also created a virtual class visit video that is housed on our YouTube channel. The video is under 10 minutes, and designed to quickly introduce students to our most common session formats.

[33] ​The purpose of this video is to speak directly to the concerns that many of our graduate students have voiced to us about the services we offer. The video was sent to all of our undergraduate faculty, and then separately to our graduate faculty. We house the video on our library guides, but we also allow faculty to embed the video directly in their courses. We also transcribed and published closed captioning resources to improve accessibility.

[34] The process of diversifying our marketing strategies has also led to the realization that our previous operating hours are not a good fit for our graduate students. Our adult learners face obstacles in scheduling and have responsibilities that may preclude them from scheduling tutoring sessions during normal working hours (Gos, 2015, p. 322). Beginning in Fall 2018, we moved our closing time to 8 p.m. in order to accommodate our learners that are working or have to meet familial obligations. We have seen considerable demand for the 5-8 p.m. time slots. Blair and Hoy (2006) surveyed writing centers and found that 90% of centers offered asynchronous online tutoring in order to provide flexibility for students (p. 68). Our center is unique in that we have never offered traditional email tutoring. Instead, we leaped over email tutoring and embraced the synchronous capabilities of WCOnline. This has meant a re-examination of a service offered by most centers. In the Fall 2018 semester, we opened email tutoring to graduate students in addition to synchronous tutoring.

[35] Our expansion of services to online learners has necessitated some changes in technology policy and technology training. By default, our online synchronous sessions use the WCOnline interface that allows for real-time video chat and text editing. Though this is the option available by default, we recognize that this technology will not work for every learner that schedules appointments with us. According to Denton (2017), constantly incorporating the newest technologies for tutoring can be tempting, but “we need to consider that the multiplicity of technologies means that different online learners have varied levels of background knowledge and different specialized understandings of technology and that synchronous online activities may not even be ideal for some online learners” (p. 190). We have encountered synchronous sessions where microphones failed, connections were unstable, and severe weather lead to power outages. We have also encountered synchronous sessions where students were uncomfortable with video chat or preferred speaking on the phone. In response to these issues, we train our staff that will interact with graduate students to be flexible and to treat WCOnline as a bundled set of communication tools rather than a single piece of software. We conduct successful synchronous and asynchronous sessions when webcams fail. Staff will use any combination of landline phone, cell phone, text chat, audio chat, or video chat to complete a session, even if it began in a different modality. Often, we move from one or more of these technologies fluidly during a given session. Our training stresses the use of alternatives rather than technical support, keeping the emphasis on writing rather than technology.

[36] The Athens State University Writing Center has traditionally relied heavily on non-directive tutoring methods. While often considered best practice, Lori Salem's (2016) recent work has cast doubt on non-directive tutoring, arguing that this type of practice does not work for every student. Non-directive methods are not a “neutral pedagogy.” Instead, these practices often work best for students that are more familiar with academic writing (p. 163). Using non-directive methods are compounded in online settings with graduate students. First, many of our graduate students have less experience with academic writing, and non-directive tutoring is less effective in online sessions. According to Hewett (2015a), indirect speech acts can lead to less straightforward conferencing, and OWI professionals should use direct speech acts (p. 122). Rather than providing single, direct commands, our staff work with graduate students to provide multiple revision possibilities (Hewett, 2015a, p. 124).

[37] We also offer our graduate students assistance with grammar using directive methods. Phillips (2013) concluded that not only could a focus on sentence-level issues be helpful to graduate students, but that one-on-one tutoring was the best venue for students to receive such assistance (para. 27). In “What Do Graduate Students Want from the Writing Center?: Tutoring Practices to Support Dissertation and Thesis Writers,” Bethany Ober Mannon (2016) surveyed 40 graduate students from across disciplines and confirmed Phillips’s findings that many graduate students are composing for audiences that will not react favorably to grammatical errors (pp. 61-62). In support of this, we have helped several graduate students and graduate faculty with proposals for conferences in which grammar became important to the success of the product. For instance, we have assisted several faculty in the process of adapting dissertation chapters to conference proposals. This work involved content decisions but also required attention to sentence-level issues.

[38] Staffing a writing center always poses challenges. Athens State University is a primarily upper-division undergraduate institution, which has presented many of the same recruiting issues faced by all two-year schools. One big hurdle is that our tutors may only work for a semester or two before graduating. We try and recruit staff during the first semester of their junior year, but this does not always happen. Recruiting qualified tutors that can serve our population of online graduate students has proved even more challenging. Our graduate programs are professional programs, and most of the students enrolled are currently working full-time, which removes the possibility of using graduate assistants that would be familiar with subject areas. In the Fall 2018 semester, our Center hired three undergraduate tutors that can each work 15-19 hours a week. We knew from past semesters that these staff would be extremely busy with undergraduate sessions, plus each of these staff members were new to academic support. The University and Writing Center administrations were concerned with hastily training staff to work with graduate students. In interviews with graduate writers, Phillips (2013) discovered that many graduate students found limitations during sessions with undergraduate tutors. One repeating limitation was that the graduate students were often working in highly specialized genres that the undergraduate tutors were inexperienced with. The Writing Center ultimately argued for additional funding to hire a part-time assistant director and graduate writing specialist. The assistant director is a former tutor that has worked in the Center for several years, and she is familiar with operating procedures.

[39] Formal training resources for graduate tutoring are scarce, so we have adopted a system where the assistant director tutors graduate students and then meets with the director afterward for a debriefing and analysis. Our assistant director is currently enrolled in graduate study, which offers our graduate learners a resource for peer tutoring. Other methods of ongoing professional development have resulted in the creation of a set of best practices for tutoring graduate students that are taken from existing research. Our graduate guidelines emphasize accommodating diverse learners, slowing the pace of feedback and commentary for students unfamiliar with our technology, frequently checking in, referring to students by name, and using straightforward and directive comments (Hewett, 2015a, pp. 38-48, 72, 125).

5. Individual Interaction

[40] The first interaction our students have with the writing center involves our scheduling software. Prior to the Fall 2018 semester, our software did not account for graduate students in any way, so we decided to make several improvements to better support them. Before a student schedules a session, they must make an account that asks a series of questions about their enrollment status and major. We added an option to indicate graduate enrollment, which allows us to track some general information about registrations. Determining how graduate students would interact with our software was another challenge. By default, WCOnline does not include an option to limit tutors by academic standing. We ultimately settled on creating a tutor called “Graduate Writing Specialist.”

[41] Creating this resource satisfied several goals. First, we wanted a method of making graduate tutoring visible. We had received several complaints from faculty and students about graduate tutoring because of this lack of visibility. Next, creating a specialized tutor would simplify the process of record keeping and assessment. Exporting system data specific to this tutor would provide us with an easy method of comparing data across our entire population. Finally, this method allows flexibility for our administration. The director or assistant director can provide graduate tutoring as needed under this designation.

[42] We have also extended outreach efforts to graduate faculty. We offer assignment and resource consultations with faculty, and we wanted to keep these sessions separate from our undergraduate and graduate sessions. The Center director is listed as an administrator-only account, which blocks students from seeing the resource. Faculty consultations are logged under the director’s name in order to provide a method of data capture for this session type.

[43] The next point of interaction is establishing a session. Our software asks some basic questions about what students want to work on in their session. Prior to Fall 2018, we funneled graduate students into the same set of checkboxes that undergraduates could select. Our undergraduate checkboxes included topics like brainstorming, creating a thesis statement, checking grammar, and formatting. This has the effect of equating graduate student writing to undergraduate writing. In our work with graduate students, we have observed that they rarely need help at the "brainstorming" stage because the majority of students in our M.Ed. are working teachers and students in our M.S in Global Logistics are working professionals. They already understand what problems are worth exploring. In contrast, many of our undergraduate writers are entering our campus as juniors and have tested out of first-year composition courses. The result is that many of our undergraduates do need help during the preliminary phases of writing. These differences were not accounted for in our scheduling software, and we were ultimately broadcasting a lack of nuance in relation to graduate writing.

[44]​ With these issues in mind, we broadened the available options and changed language in order to reflect more diverse needs in our sessions. These alterations were also based in part on faculty feedback. Several of our programs indicated that students had issues with integrating sources into writing, so we used that language deliberately in order to create synergy between faculty instructional language and our own vocabulary for writing.

[45] Online graduate sessions differ from our online sessions with undergraduate students. The director and assistant director both review materials in-depth before any session, even if only one staff member is conducting the session. Before the Fall 2018 semester, our Center casually accepted syllabi and assignment handouts from faculty. We did not require faculty to share these resources with our staff, even if they were requiring writing center visits as a part of their coursework. The director now reaches out to graduate faculty at several intervals in the beginning weeks of the semester in order to request syllabi, writing assignments, and short descriptions of writing resources. We are fortunate that our campus is home to only three graduate degrees, and the number of graduate faculty is small enough that we can foster communication. This has made the process of understanding graduate writing in our context easier. Our small collection of syllabi and assignments allows for the director and assistant director to review a graduate writing project within the larger context of the course. When possible, we devote a full half-hour to preparation for an online graduate session in order to maximize time spent in the project. The staff member in charge of the session reads over the syllabus, assignment handouts/rubric, and then the student project. This 30-minute window is frequently needed to read through longer projects with more rigorous demands.

[46] We currently limit undergraduate sessions to one hour, but we have altered this policy for graduate sessions, allowing for as much time as the student needs. Wolfe and Griffin (2012) found that online sessions generally had 30% fewer turns than face-to-face sessions (p. 85). This informs our one-hour limit on undergraduate sessions, and also informs our shift to more flexible timeframes for graduate sessions. Our graduate students may only have the opportunity to block out one segment of time per week to meet with our staff, and we want to avoid ending sessions based on time policy. This flexibility does mean that sessions can run for much longer than our staff and students are used to. Fatigue is a present concern, but at the moment we have decided on maximizing accessibility and flexibility for our graduate learners. Our session limits for undergraduates also grew out of a need to accomodate a large number of students.

[47] Modality has been a central concern in our online graduate sessions, and the most commonly cited barrier to graduate students pursuing our services is time. Our Center is open after hours from Monday to Thursday, but graduate students have still commented on availability. As of Fall 2018, we are offering both synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Our synchronous sessions occur in the WCOnline video and chat interface, and our asynchronous sessions occur over email using the comment feature in Microsoft Word. We were initially hesitant to offer email tutoring because of its sometimes ominous association with editing, but our email sessions are often dynamic. In several cases, a face-to-face session leads to a follow-up appointment over email or phone. Martinez and Olsen (2015) suggest providing multimodal feedback in asynchronous tutoring when available (p. 194). We have found in our asynchronous sessions that multimodality is common. For instance, several students have called the Center immediately after receiving written feedback in order to clarify comments or seek further advice.

[48] In order to make the most of each appointment, online graduate sessions begin with an explanation of expectations. Our staff will explain the general progression of a session, and move to try and understand the graduate student’s goals for the session. Blair and Hoy (2006) argue that community formation in online environments can only happen when expectations are articulated early rather than late in the learning process. They write specifically with an online course in mind, but their observation applies equally well in a tutoring session. We have found that our graduate learners tend to focus on the holistic project, and this can complicate limited session space in synchronous tutoring. We make every effort to narrow the session to a few specific issues in order to focus on the most critical issues present (Hewett, 2015a, p. 38). After narrowing to a specific set of issues, we intervene directly in discussions with graduate students in order to foster clarity and efficiency (Hewett, 2015a, p. 84). Our tutoring is problem focused, and we have adapted the following best practices from Hewett (2015a) to guide our sessions though “(1) being focused; (2) tying together the major writing issues by addressing, identifying, and teaching to them; (3) showing how certain problems affect the text as a whole; (4) modeling good writing; (5) using the student’s own writing and not template or cookie-cutter language; and (6) teaching a lesson that requires some responsive activity on the student’s part” (Hewett, 2015a, p. 90). Many graduate students are using the Writing Center for the first time, and our focus on efficiency is designed to foster repeat sessions. “Checking in” is a vital part of our practice across all academic levels, but is particularly important for our graduate students that may be less familiar with how online tutoring operates (Hewett, 2015a pg. 131). Our staff will frequently stop to re-assess the session so that our learner is informed of progress and session goals. Our graduate sessions end with an invitation for follow up. We offer a change in modality in order to both inform students our services, but also to provide new opportunities for engaging texts in different ways (Hewett, 2015a, p. 71).

6. Conclusion

[49] Our current work with online graduate tutoring has provided opportunities for our returning learners to receive academic support. Re-orienting an online writing center toward graduate students required significant thought, and ultimately we found that online graduate tutoring required more planning than simply duplicating our online tutoring methods for undergraduates. Our work is still preliminary in nature, and we are planning several future services in order to expand our offerings further. First, providing synchronous and asynchronous online tutoring for graduate students necessitates that we begin to codify and formalize our practices to ensure that students are receiving consistent experiences. Hewett (2015) recommends using a consistent vocabulary across instruction, and creating a glossary of terms that can be shared with students in online writing courses (p. 96). We are in the planning stages of adopting this strategy for our online sessions. The document will include a list of terms, and also a brief explanation of expectations for online sessions. The Writing Center has also received numerous requests from faculty to facilitate a standing writing group or bootcamp. Interestingly, the faculty we have spoken to want the group to exist for faculty only. Several graduate faculty have also expressed interest in writing groups for graduate students. In the Spring 2019 semester, we plan to pilot a face-to-face writing group for faculty, and a virtual writing group for graduate students. Researchers have demonstrated the benefits of these camps for students (Simpson, 2013; Busl, Donelly, & Capdeveille, 2015; McMurray 2017; Gardin, Pauley-Gose, & Stewart, 2006).

[50] The theme that undercuts each of these efforts is building a culture of writing on our campus for our onsite and online learners and striving for parity across all student experiences. As a result of our work with graduate students, the writing center is beginning to emerge as the focal point for discussions about writing and literacy on campus. Reaching out to individual faculty members during the process of creating new pre-published resources has raised our profile on campus, and we are now experiencing a steady stream of inquiries and ideas from faculty about what constitutes effective writing within our degree programs. It is our hope that these conversations will continue and that our work with online graduate learners will have an impact on all of our operations.