PEER TUTORING IN THE CIS SANDBOX: DOES IT WORK?

This paper reports on a student-created and facilitated peer-tutoring activity to assist first-year students in preparing for their final exam in an introductory information technology course. Tutors at the CIS Sandbox, a collaborative learning lab at an American university, offered a series of "Crunch Sessions" to their peers. This paper examines how these sessions model characteristics of peer tutoring, and describes how social media and Internet-based collaboration tools support a blended learning environment where an in-person event is aligned with a web presence. Interviews with student tutors and participants suggest that the peer relationship between tutors and tutees was conducive to an open exchange of questions and answers among participants, and that the sessions contributed to student learning for those who attended. Implications for designing and researching online peer learning activities in higher education contexts are discussed.