An online tutorial should be the core of the student learning support services in the digital era to maintainthe quality of distanced higher education. However, in Universitas Terbuka with supposed to be the cyberuniversity of Indonesia, the participation in the online tutorials was still not encouraging. For example,the average of the percentage of students’ involvement in the first academic semester of 2017 to the 2ndsemester 2018 for one course was 2.21%. This study aimed to identify barriers for students to participate inthe online tutorial. The method consisted of two stages. First, analyzing qualitative data that were gatheredthrough open-ended questions to identify factors of the barriers. Second, developing 20 items’ questionnairebased on the factors identified in the first stage and analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural EquationModel (PLS-SEM). The study involved 76 students in the first stage and 237 students in the second. Theresults of the study revealed that the students’ barriers to online tutorial reflected in four factors, i.e. (1)information, (2) motivation, (3) technical, and (4) supports; each factor confirmed significantly (p-values < 0.05) with t-values equal to 14.108, 27.875, 7.502, and 25.640, respectively. The study proposed somerecommendations to improve student participation in online tutorials.