Students don’t have to go far to receive tutoring: They only need to sit at their computers.
While traditional face-to-face tutoring is available in the Student Success Center on the bottom floor of Alumnae Hall, students can sign in and take part in online tutoring with Smarthinking.
Smarthinking is a convenient option for students with hectic workloads or job responsibilities because it’s available to students 24/7.
Bruce Riley, Tutorial Coordinator, encourages students to get help any way they can, and he said tutoring center services are a way for students to get ahead in their studies.
“Smarthinking is available for every student, full-time or part-time. As long as you’re a student here at Misericordia you can access it,” said Riley.
Riley said signing up is easy. Sign into the E-MU portal, hover the cursor over the Student Services tab, and then select Smarthinking from the dropbox.
Emily Ousoulijoglou, a first- year social work major, said she is pleased with tutoring services.
“Overall, it is a great resource to have if you have any questions or if you just need the course material repeated,” said Ousoulijoglou.
The good thing about Smarthinking is that it is completely free and students don’t have to wait for the Student Success Center to open or for a tutoring session to begin.
“This program has a lot of benefits for students in long-term and short-term,” said Riley.
Ousoulijoglou said she received tutoring before an important government test, and she’s confident it helped her to receive a good grade because tutors are trained to help students retain information easily.
Riley said students can even receive tutoring on Smarthinking even if the Center does not have
a live tutor to offer. For example, if a student is looking for an ac- counting tutor and the Student Success Center does not have a
tutor available for that class at that time, the student can turn to Smarthinking to get the help they need.
“If it is 3:00 in the morning, a student can just sign on for academic support around their schedule,” said Riley.
The online tutor also has a tool called Whiteboard, which allows students to submit their assignments. The tutor can write on the submissions, so the tutoring session also presents information visually, which helps address different learning styles.
“With Whiteboard the tutor can upload charts, graphs and images and this can make the session more interactive with the student,” said Riley.
Smarthinking is an outside service to which the university subscribes.
According to Riley, many students have signed up for Smarthinking and it has received a lot of positive feed- back. It will even help withlower-order writing concerns.
“They will be able to help you out with grammar, sentence structure and things of that nature.”