Annabel Pyne
Contributing Writer
WarriorFish, East Stroudsburg University’s student appointment program, has been offline since the beginning of the semester. This disruption is inhibiting the Tutoring Program’s attendance tracking, appointment scheduling and other academic support services.
Students use WarriorFish to make or cancel appointments with professors or tutors, serving as a key mechanism for student support. Administration also monitors WarriorFish to track students’ usage of the tutoring program’s services.
“Warriorfish being down drastically affects the Writing Studio’s apparent availability, causing our online hours to be significantly less useful and our scheduling to be limited to day of appointments, rather than students being able to plan ahead with their tutoring appointments,” Sam Krol, the Writing Studio office assistant, said.
Unlike the individual tutors, the Writing Studio’s sessions are not tied to a specific class. Students and professors track appointments and document sessions as evidence of engaging in university-provided support.
If a professor requires a student to get help from the Writing Studio, WarriorFish is used to provide the evidence they attended. With WarriorFish offline, The Writing Studio lacks any electronic means to prove a student’s attendance.
The late-night online hours, which are crucial for commuters and students who aren’t available during the day, can no longer have appointments scheduled through WarriorFish.
Instead, students have to e-mail the Writing Studio or go in person to set up an appointment. Without a method of widespread communication, many students are unaware of this new procedure.
WarriorFish went offline when East Stroudsburg attempted to merge it with the new WarriorConnect, an online hub for their personal academic profile. There were issues with the merge that led to it being temporarily down and there is not yet any timeline on when it will be restored
Tutors are now tracking outcomes for their sessions using pen and paper. This way, they can still reference it for future sessions or to prove that a student has come to visit them. There is also a yellow slip or “golden ticket” a student can acquire to prove to a professor they went in for help. Mackenzie, a student tutor at the Writing Studio, comments that it is an additional challenge, though they are developing a new system.
“We’re resorting to paper and pen, so I feel like it’s not as convenient, but we’re still getting it done,” said Mackenzie.
Despite this outage, the tutoring center’s employees are fully operational. The drop-in hours are still available for individual tutors and the Writing Studio.
If a student wishes to make an appointment for a specific time they can still email their tutor or go to the library to make one in person. The Tutoring Center and the Writing Studio continue to be open to students regardless of this inconvenience.