The Academic Senate convened on March 12 bringing attention to student use of online tutoring program NetTutor.

NetTutor is an online tutoring service available to City College students if they prefer not to have in-person tutoring. A question arose regarding the need for NetTutor, its usage, and how much NetTutoring costs for students.

President of Academic Senate Joshua Ramirez said there were concerns about whether the tutoring services aligned with City College’s line-of-sight rule and if it’s pushing away in-person tutoring. Line-of-sight tutoring is having supervision to ensure safer working and learning environments.

Beth Taylor-Schott, the dean of learning support services, spoke about the background of online tutoring. Taylor-Schott said the original emphasis came from accreditation.

“We needed to have . . . the same services to online students in an online format that we were providing in-person students,” Taylor-Schott said.

It was mentioned that NetTutor offers both synchronous and asynchronous tutoring where a student can text a tutor or submit a paper and receive feedback. Associate professor of English, Barbara Bell announced to the senate she doesn’t agree with this approach for students. 

“The whole goal for the student is for the writer to set the agenda,” Bell said. “Not for the tutor to go ‘let me just take this and start fixing it.’”

Bell said she would like to see how the process actually works. She also mentioned that people she knew weren’t aware of whether NetTutor was free or paid for. 

Taylor-Schott mentioned that the original use of NetTutor was free, but now City College would have to pay a total of around $20,000 to continue using it.  

Mathematics professor Gabriel Pretel pointed out the use of NetTutor and said a spike in usage could be because a teacher says to go get tutoring for extra credit, not because they need it.

“The decisions we make as instructors is going to directly affect the business of NetTutor and doesn’t necessarily mean that because they’re getting more business that there’s a more need for it,” Pretel said. 

Accounting and finance professor Laura Woyach suggested faculty needs to hear and acknowledge what the students want.

“Whether we like it or not we are a business . . . our constituents and our customer is our students,” Woyach said. “If we don’t give our customer what they want they’ll go elsewhere.”   

The next Academic Senate meeting will take place on Wednesday, April 9.