ABSTRACT
One-to-one, face-to-face tutorial support is of course the most expensive form of student support ever devised. Most face-to-face support is organized in groups for obvious cost-effective reasons. But aside from simple economic reasons, there is the enormous resource that bringing students together can offer for mutual support and overcoming isolation. Face-to-face interaction offers the easiest interchange between students. It enables them to contextualize their queries and problems by sharing them and to explore methods of overcoming problems. There is probably more effort and resource going into organizing face-to-face student support in open and distance learning than any other area of support. There is of course a massive amount written about face-to-face teaching in all kinds of contexts, and it would be impossible to do more than touch on a topic that can be the subject of a year's course.
