Online tutoring to support programming exercises

Abstract

Programming exercises lend themselves to learning environments that can provide automated testing and formative feedback to allow students to learn independently and at their own pace. Even so, there are still situations where there is no substitute for interaction with a human expert to provide guidance and encouragement to students. We describe how online tutoring is used within two very different contexts on the same platform. While both contexts use a specific learning environment, many of the experiences encountered in providing online tutoring support provide important lessons for educators that generalise to using any comparable environment.