Learning Resource Center Moves Services Online; Student Response is Strong
As UMass Amherst has fully transitioned to remote learning in response to the coronavirus, the campus’s Learning Resource Center (LRC) has also moved online, with first-week statistics showing a strong student response.
The LRC supports undergraduate academic success, through offerings such as peer tutoring in over 100 high enrollment courses and supplemental instruction (SI) for many of the courses students traditionally find challenging.
LRC Director Lin Tang worked quickly with staff to move both group and individual support options online, offering live Zoom SI and tutoring sessions. The SI sessions are uploaded to a cloud, accessed through Moodle, for enrolled students unable to attend the scheduled meetings.
Data from the first week of remote support (the week following spring break), showed 2,015 students accessing Zoom supplemental instruction and tutoring. That is up from 1,125 the week following spring break in 2019. Staff think that the increased flexibility of online resources may contribute to the increase, as well as the reassurance of academic support in an uncertain time.
Tang said that the transition presented a challenge that the LRC staff met with enthusiasm. “This transition to remote learning was both innovative and ambitious. UMass Amherst's LRC is unique in the size and scope of our programs; last semester we saw over 20,000 student visits and over 5,500 discrete students in our academic support services. To replicate the scale of such services online was a challenging task, but it is a shift that we have been thinking about for the past year, because we want to make our services more accessible to students who may not have the time to attend in person sessions,” Tang explained. “The days before spring break, we took the knowledge gained from various online pilots we have tried in the past and worked with the LRC admin team to set up a process to go fully online.”
She continued, “I am beyond impressed and humbled by the work of the LRC staff, and even more so by our student staff team – our SI leaders, tutors and ExSEL leaders signed on without hesitation to go online and continue working and supporting their peers. These leaders worked with us tirelessly throughout the onboarding of services and have been flexible and innovative in how they are delivering content and creating peer-to-peer learning for students in an online capacity. The LRC has always been known for our pedagogical and active learning, training and supervision of our tutors and leaders, but the active learning strategies they are using in their sessions now represents the best of active learning within a peer-to-peer dynamic.”
Faculty and campus partners can help guide students to LRC online offerings using the downloadable guide on this page. Tang notes that staff, as well as student leaders and tutors, are learning from this experience to consider best practices in online academic support for the future.