Challenges and Benefits of online tutoring

Challenges:
I find online tutoring challenging precisely because it allows me to take much more time with a student's work, and that's time I don't always have. I've realized reading work on the computer (whether a student's, colleague's, or my own) makes comprehension difficult, and I often need to reread multiple times before commenting. I also find that responding takes more time because, as Remington suggested, a job of the tutor in written responses is to model good writing. (Trying to explain certain concepts is also more difficult with online tutoring because there is no discussion to supplement one person's speaking and it generally takes more words.) It's also difficult to supply suggestions online because I don't want to the student to copy and paste what I'm saying (what Remington notes about plagiarism), but I also don't want to confuse them if I vaguely suggest they reorder a sentence, or consider new word choices.

Benefits:
This week I've had to do online work with both of my enrollment students and the benefits of that, after I've established a relationship them, seem far greater than the benefits of submitting a paper back to a student I've never met before. I don't think my style changes with students I've worked with, but we have common ground of things we've discussed, a vocabulary we use, and our rapport, which means I get to worry less about how they receive my comments or if they understand my comments. It seems to supplement Writing Center instruction/tutoring rather than be an easier way to go about it.

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