BCC Offers Free Tutoring to All Students
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — With pandemic restrictions being largely lifted, tutoring services at Berkshire Community College (BCC) have returned.
"The Tutoring Center is a friendly and dynamic environment," said Learning Services Coordinator Justine Fitzgerald. "We are busy building back our services after the pandemic pushed everything off campus."
BCC Tutoring Center staff recently held a tutor training session with a focus on improving accessibility to tutoring services. Fitzgerald said the session was a productive one in which new and longtime tutors and staff shared ideas and learned about recent changes to the tutoring programs at BCC.
"We have made significant headway revising systems to make both in-person and online tutoring more accessible," she said.
Those revisions include changing policies to allow more flexibility in scheduling for both tutors and students, as well as enabling single sign-on access to Smarthinking, an online tutoring service used by students across the country.
Tutoring services, housed in the Learning Commons of The Johnathan Edwards Library, are free to all students. Tutoring options include in-person sessions, available by appointment, and virtual tutoring via Smarthinking, which provides 24-hour, on-demand support using whiteboard interface technology to connect students and tutors.
Students can access Smarthinking through their Moodle accounts (the learning management system used at BCC) or can request a tutor by visiting www.berkshirecc.edu/tutor.
Students who request an in-person tutoring session are matched with peer or community tutors. Peer tutors are current BCC students recommended by their professors to tutor in a certain course or subject, while community tutors are local people from a variety of backgrounds and expertise who offer a practical application of many fields of study.
Tutors are trained to help students organize materials, understand course content, develop study skills and prepare for tests, improve writing skills and more.
For more information on scheduling a tutoring session or becoming a tutor, email tutorial@berkshirecc.edu or call (413) 236-1650.
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