Session Efficiency and General Updates

Hi team,

This is another packed NewsFeed post. I strongly recommend setting time aside to read each section carefully. Please reach out with any questions. Have a great weekend! 🙂

Session Efficiency

Over the years, we’ve spoken to thousands of students, teachers, and parents about their Yup experience. We consistently hear that the “speed of the session” is one of the most important aspects of the experience. In 80%+ of instances where customers leave Yup, they cite “slow sessions” as the reason.

Over the last 3 months, we’ve made incredible progress in this area by making changes to our rubric and eliminating unnecessary work at the end of each session. Since implementing the new rubric on July 12, we have reduced average session length by 50% from 47 minutes to 33 minutes! Congratulations on your hard work! All of the rubric changes came directly from tutor input.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moving forward, we’re looking to make additional gains in session efficiency by reducing the average response time of our tutor base. The average tutor response time is 20 seconds for the month of November. We aim to reduce this to 17 seconds by the end of 2021.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are aware that technical bugs and message delays have recently caused these numbers to increase. Please note that our engineers are hard at work fixing this. Please continue to send reports of issues as they occur through UserSnap. This provides our engineers with the information to directly address the issues that you are experiencing

Tips for increasing session speed from some of our strongest tutors

But how can we speed up the Yup experience without compromising our high standards for learning?

We took a look at tutors with the following characteristics:

  • Rubric score avg > 9.7
  • Avg session length < 35 min
  • Avg response time < 15 sec
  • Student ratings > 95%

And asked them for their strategies for keeping sessions speedy while delivering sound educational outcomes. We’ve compiled some of their responses here: Strategies for Improving Session Speed.

Please review the above and let us know if you have any feedback or if there are ways that we can make it easier for you to implement these strategies!

Slow Response Times

In order to better understand when tutors are responding slowly and could benefit from the above strategies, we will be changing some of our session tags.

Currently, we have 3 slow response tags that you may have seen applied to sessions:

  • Slow Response Time – applied by TQMs; very rarely used
  • Slow Response (minor) – auto-applied if maximum reply time is between 2 and 5 min
  • Slow Response (major) – auto-applied if maximum reply time is >5 min

Only the first one influences monthly bonuses via our professionalism metric for tutor tags.

Moving forward, we will be removing the three tags above and implementing a single slow response tag that auto-applies if avg_tutor_response_time is above 30 seconds for a session.

General Updates

Yup Webinar

We’re so excited to announce that Yup is hosting a Webinar with Education Week and leaders from Yup Math Tutoring, Zearn, National Student Support Accelerator, and Math Motivators as we discuss “Addressing Unfinished Learning in Math: Providing Tutoring at Scale.” 

Our panel includes:

At Yup, we strongly believe that tutoring can be a primary solution in combating learning loss and engaging students. We’ve seen firsthand the impact that each of you has on our students when they get a session with you. We’d love for you to join us and be a part of the larger conversation that we’re having around providing tutoring at scale.

If you’d like to register and attend, please do! If you know any teachers, school leaders, or administrators who might be interested in attending, please reach out to Kreg and put us in touch.

TGP Levels and Student Ratings

We’ve updated these in Tutor Workbooks! Congratulations to everyone who has moved up levels in the last few months. 🙂

We will also be raising our professionalism threshold for student ratings from 80% to 85% for each month. We feel that this is a reasonable threshold that nearly all tutors are consistently able to maintain.

Shift ending and overtime

Quick reminder about our new overtime and shift ending policy:

  • Tutors must be free up to 30 mins after a given shift in case of a longer session. As such, tutors should avoid taking on shifts if they will need to leave directly after. This applies to shift takeovers, temporary shift additions, and set weekly schedules.
  • Tutors can work with the student for as long as the student likes during this time.
  • If you need to leave an overtime session, please notify the student 15 minutes before your 30 minutes of overtime are going to end.

For specific examples, see here.

Checking to see if students want to do additional problems

We are still seeing a large number of sessions where tutors are not checking whether students would like to work on an additional problem. As a reminder, here is an easy-to-follow process for ending the session:

  • After finishing a problem, ask the student if they have another problem they’d like to work on
  • When the student does not have more problems to work on, ask if they’d like you to create one for them (e.g. “Got it! Would you like me to provide a similar problem so that you can get extra practice?”)
  • Emphasize that there is no pressure to stay (e.g. “No worries if you have to go!”)
  • When the student wants to leave, offer a friendly goodbye and words of encouragement (e.g. “Great work today! It was a pleasure working with you :)”)

Please note that TQMs will be marking “No” for rubric strand E3 in any sessions where tutors are not following the guidelines.

Discussion: