Interview with Rob Honomichl, DSU Tutor
This past fall Rob tutored several graduate students in CET 756, Introduction in Instructional Programming. Some he tutored face-to-face, while others he tutored at a distance.
He did say that the face-to-face tutoring is his preference over tutoring over a distance, but when someone lives in Pierre, it is hard to do it any other way. When tutoring for the programming classes, the students would e-mail their code to Rob and he would e-mail advice back to them. This was a slow process, as questions couldn't be instantly answered. It was tough at times for Rob not to just fix the code, instead of sending ideas, because he knew the students were lost and didn't know what his hints meant.
Another problem with programming tutoring is that people would send code, but also needed to send the images that they were using and the names of the images. People in the class called the images by different names and that caused problems when Rob tried to help fix various peoples problems with their code.
Tutoring over a distance was a necessity though, as people did not have the time to drive all the way to Madison and back on a weeknight to get help from Rob with the programming class.