Editor’s note: We would like to thank Michaela Bergland from Florida SouthWestern State College, for providing this piece. To contact the author, please email Michaela Bergland. If you would like to share your writing center’s experience during COVID-19, please submit via WLN.

Michaela Bergland

When my fellow tutors and I left our Writing Center mid-March to work remotely due to COVID-19, we expected to be back in April. Well, April was pushed back to May, then June, and now August. But the changes my fellow tutors and I have made as a result have only bettered our own practices and our center as a whole.

One of the best things to come from COVID-19 has been seeing how resilient and resourceful my fellow tutors are, which they demonstrated from the day we found out we’d be going remote.

When I came into our Writing Center after hearing that we’d be working remotely for a while, I found my coworkers already investigating different tools and technology that we could use to help our students. Our center is walk-in based, so we’re used to working with students right when they needed help. Appointments and remote tutoring were relatively new to us, so we knew that we were all going to need to adapt.

My fellow tutors investigated Microsoft Teams, Google Docs, Zoom, Microsoft Word Online chat, and drop-off email appointments. After some trial and error, we came up with the three options we thought would best work for our students: live sessions over Zoom, live sessions over Microsoft Word Online, and drop-off essays through our Writing Center email.

Zoom would allow us to talk to students live over video, just like our sessions in the center, and screen sharing would allow us to look at the same document in real time and go over the student’s questions, so we quickly made this an option for our students.

For Microsoft Word Online sessions, the student would share their document with us, and we’d review the essay together, talking live with the student using the chat feature.

Finally, for drop-off sessions, the student would email their assignment, instructions, and concerns to our Writing Center email. Then, we’d go through the assignment using Track Changes and the comment feature and send it back to the student.

After every session, no matter the modality, we also send the student a consultation document, where we can explain certain necessary revisions in greater detail. We also used consultation documents in our in-person sessions on campus, so it was important for us to carry that practice over to our remote sessions.

Along with our new appointments, we’ve also created new resources for our students during our time working remotely. We’ve added to our already existing Instagram and Facebook pages by creating a YouTube page, where we’ve been creating videos to further help our students. My fellow tutors and I recorded the workshops we typically provide for classes throughout the semester and uploaded them to YouTube so students can still access them, and we’ve also been working on creating tutorials, such as setting up a paper in MLA or APA format and providing grammar tips.

COVID-19 has provided us with the opportunity to make our services more accessible for our students, which will be one of the best takeaways from this pandemic. We plan to continue our new appointment styles—Zoom, Word Online Chat, and drop-off emails—on top of providing our typical in-person sessions, which will now abide by social distancing guidelines, when the fall semester begins and we return to campus.

While COVID-19 has provided plenty of challenges, seeing my fellow tutors rise to the occasion and experiment with new methods to give our students the best experience possible has been incredibly inspiring to see, and it has given us all the opportunity to explore new avenues to make our tutoring more accessible, which is an opportunity we may not have otherwise had.