Supporting Online Community College Students With Trained Tutors in a Post-COVID World

COVID-19 created unplanned, fully remote educational spaces. One California community college tutor training program augmented their tutor training practices to pivot to meet the needs of students now confronted with fully online learning. Using a mixed-methodology approach (e.g., survey and focus groups/individual interviews) over the course of one year, this program attempted to identify successes and potential gaps in providing equitable online tutoring access and to investigate possible challenges in meeting student affective needs within new, fully online tutoring spaces. Findings indicated clear gaps in student knowledge about online tutoring services, a high level of affective satisfaction with online tutoring, and a demographic mismatch between the proportion of student groups who utilized tutoring services as compared to the proportion who responded to the survey. Ultimately, it was found that tutor training programs need to continue to update training practices to meet the needs of students in a post-COVID world.