It’s 1 a.m. the night before your midterm. Through the haze of hormones begging you for sleep, you can’t remember yesterday’s lecture from last week’s.

Before, students might have looked around futilely for help before calling it quits. Now, they can turn toward EC’s online tutoring platform, NetTutor, a free service covering 27 different subjects, according to a Learning Resources Center announcement.

“Students, it seems, are very busy and it’s not always possible to come on campus to meet face to face tutors,” Sheryl Kunisaki, assistant director of the Learning Resources Center, said. “This is an opportunity to get help at 10 o’clock at night when the library, or the math and writing centers might be closed.”

According to the service’s website, students can register by visiting nettutor.com/ecc and using their school email to create an account. The site will run on desktops with the latest java update and on mobile devices as well.

“So far, it’s been really convenient,” Todd Pye, 24, music major, said. “If the hours don’t work with my work or school schedule, I can log on and see a tutor right from my couch.”

The service emphasizes learning instead of being a cheat sheet for homework.

“You can ask specific questions but they’ll never give you just an answer. The purpose of the service is to make students become independent learners, so they will guide you through the process,” Kunisaki said.

While the service boasts many benefits and conveniences to students, one drawback is the lack of personalization offered by a live tutor.

“Sometimes if the student doesn’t quite know what they’re having problems with, you might have to spend some time going back and forth so the tutor gets a better understanding of your needs, which I think is easier face to face,” Kunisaki said. “You see my expressions, my tone of voice, we have paper that we’re both working on.”

Online tutoring is currently being funded by both EC and the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) program. Its potential expansion will depend on results this year as the school seeks to meet the demands of the students, she added.

NetTutor’s supporters believe pessimists concerned about server crashes or down time may very well have a change of heart once they give the service a try.

“Just as a live tutor may catch a cold and have to call out absent, you can go receive tutoring and find out that your tutor isn’t there that day,” Pye said. “We understand that but we shouldn’t use that as an excuse not to use [online tutoring] when it is working. We always look for the negative but right now it’s all positive.”