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The Centers for Learning at UMass Lowell has had an ongoing peer tutoring program since the 1980s. In recent years, the centers have decided to expand their program by offering online tutoring. By providing academic help through the Web, students who commute or simply have busy schedules during the day are still able to get assistance at night.
The program began in Fall 2006 and has since grown in popularity. Students can sign-in online and receive help in Physics I and II and Calculus I and II. Peer tutors are on-call from 7 p.m. until midnight, Sunday through Wednesday in a chat room that can be found through the Centers for Learning website. The website comes equipped with step-by-step instructions.
Since online tutoring has become such a phenomenon at the University, those who came up with the idea will be able to explain their program at a New England-wide conference in November. LAANE, or Learning Assistance Association of New England, is holding its 25th annual conference that focuses on developmental education. The theme for this year’s event is “Revolution Revisited: New Directions in Developmental Education.”
Suzanne Gamache, coordinator of tutoring services, and David Driscoll, associate director of educational computing, will present the online tutoring project and share their experiences at the conference. They will demonstrate how the peer tutors conduct sessions and what a student would need to do in order to log on to the program.
Gamache and Driscoll will come back from the conference having helped other schools start their own online tutoring and also with ideas to better UMass Lowell’s already successful program.
For more information about online tutoring, visit the Online_Tutoring website.
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