Tutors in times of Covid-19: their role in light of constraints and opportunities

This paper examines how the tutoring service for first year students offered by Milano-Bicocca University since 2013 has successfully continued to provide academic support during the health, economic, and social crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the early years of the service’s functioning – initially offered on four of the University’s degree courses – it was deemed necessary to develop a new, broader perspective on academic guidance that contemplated the involvement of “peer” as well as teacher tutors. This revolutionary and innovative change in the tutoring process meant that senior students were co-opted onto the guidance project to offer the benefit of their own experience in coping with the challenges of first year at university. The tutoring programme team provided participating senior students with ad hoc training and supervised them as they conducted individual and group activities with first year students. Thanks to this strategy, the service was eventually extended to the students of almost all the university’s degree programmes: in the 2019/2020 academic year, around 100 peer tutors worked with students on over 20 bachelor’s degree courses. The positive results obtained to date in terms of student involvement and investment in tutor education underpinned the university’s recent decision to make tutoring available to students on master’s degree courses also, beginning in 2020/2021. In the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the complexity and uncertainty it has generated, the tutoring service has been reorganized and largely redesigned; more specifically, given the suspension of on-campus teaching alongside other restrictive measures, tutoring activities are now delivered remotely, via a mixture of live and offline formats. This paper offers a detailed description of the various components of the tutoring service offered during the complex and challenging COVID-19 emergency. These components have been designed to: meet current societal requirements, foster reflection on the changes prompted by the public health emergency, and express developments in how the tutoring service has been delivered and interpreted since it was originally set up.