This Fall, Lesley’s Center for Academic Achievement (CAA) launched a pilot of Brainfuse’s Help Now Online Tutoring platform to support online students, off-campus cohorts and other Lesley students whose busy lives prohibit them from accessing tutoring in the CAA. Brainfuse’s Help Now tutoring program includes individualized tutoring and study tools to help Lesley students be successful in their classes. This initiative is one of the Retention Center’s priorities as a result of last years’ exploration of qualitative and quantitative data on student persistence.

HelpNow consists of three components: live tutoring, asynchronous and synchronous writing labs and a learning skills center.

• Live tutoring: Live tutoring is provided in a variety of college disciplines including business, math, social sciences and hard sciences. Tutors and students communicate in real time through the Brainfuse online classroom. All sessions are recorded for later review.
• Asynchronous Writing Lab: Students submit their writing online through a secure service. Within 24 hours, a writing specialist will return the paper along with a detailed analysis focusing on organization, voice, and coherence. In addition to Brainfuse tutors asynchronous online writing support continues to be available directly from CAA tutors.
• Live Writing Lab: Students who are in the preliminary stages of the writing process have the option to receive live, one-to-one writing assistance from a writing specialist.
• Learning Skills Center: Students address academic needs such as reading comprehension, developmental math and science or time management to build essential skills for college success. Students are offered a variety of learning options based on the way they learn best.

Brainfuse is integrated into myLesley so all students have easy access to connect with a live tutor. Tutors are experienced classroom teachers with graduate training in their discipline.

Usage so far this semester has been highly successful especially in the Business and Math programs where it was piloted and strongly promoted. Students can easily access Brainfuse Online Tutoring from their myLesley home page. Subjects include Accounting, Statistics, Economics, Calculus, Geometry, Biology, Chemistry, Writing, Psychology and many others.