Author: Team Yup

Updated Definition for “Gave Answer” Tag

The Current ‘Gave Answer’ Tag

Currently, the “Gave Answer” tag applies when:

“Tutor directly gives away the answer to the student OR tutor arrives at the solution without involving the student in key steps.”

However, we’ve noticed that tutors are now afraid to push information or give steps to the student, fearing that they will earn a “Gave Answer” tag. On the other side, parents and students are complaining that some tutors are being too strict and not giving any or key information during the session. The tutors keep asking guiding questions when they should be providing hints to help the student learn.

As a result, students are frustrated and have lower confidence in their ability to solve the problem. While we are proud that tutors are not giving away answers, we are concerned that we are making our customers extremely unhappy. 

New Definition of ‘Gave Answer’ Tag

Moving forward we are loosening the definition of the “Gave Answer” tag and encouraging you to give more hints to the students. Providing hints to students is very important as it helps them improve understanding and speeds up the session. Now, a Gave Answer tag will apply when:

“Tutor directly gives away the answer to the student OR tutor fails to have the student participate in at least one step.”

A student is considered to have participated in the learning process if they:

+ submit a photo of their work

+ participate in an example

+ answer high level questions (why, how)

+ complete a CFU

+ solve a step

Moving forward, we hope that you will provide students with more hints to help them learn faster and have a smoother learning experience. We are excited to see you push more information and give more hints to students.

— Team Yup

 

Introducing Badges

Use the New Star Feature

We want to reward students for participating and being proactive during sessions. Thus, we’re introducing our latest feature, badges!

You will now have the option to give students a star to motivate and inspire them. The star icon will be available on your tutor dashboard. Once you click on the star button, you will have to confirm that you want to send it. After you click “yes”, a star will be sent to the student.

Feel free to give students one or multiple stars during your sessions. Here are some situations where we recommend that you send a star:

+ Student uploads their work

+ Student actively participates

+ Student asks insightful questions

+ Student does more than one question

After giving a star, please let the student know why you are giving them the star. For example, “Hey Allen, you’ve earned a star because you’ve been asking great questions in this session. Great work!”

Please do not abuse this feature by giving students too many stars.  

We will provide further directions around badges as we learn more from student reactions. We are excited to see you use this new feature to help students participate and learn!

 

NEW FEATURE: Student’s Chat With Yup Bot Shown in Review State

UPDATE (9/19): This feature is scheduled to be released sometime on Monday, September 25th.

What Will Change?

Currently, students using our iOS app can chat with our Yup Bot while waiting for a request to be claimed and reviewed.

Students interact with the bot by tapping orange buttons like the two shown above.

Our engineers have finished building a feature that lets you see the responses that students tap. It should be released sometime this coming Wednesday, September 20th, although this date may be pushed back by a day or two Monday, September 25th.

The New Bot Questions

When the feature goes live, there will be a series of five questions that the student can answer. (NOTE: If the student does not have the latest version of the iOS app, then you will see their responses, but not the bot’s questions.)

Here are the questions and the kinds of responses that they can have:

  1. How well do you want to understand this material?
    • Enough to solve this problem
    • Enough to solve similar problems
  2. How do you feel about this material?
    • Comfortable
    • Not comfortable
  3. Have you tried anything or gotten started?
    • Yes
    • No
  4. Want to snap a photo of work you’ve done on this material?
    • Yes [student sends image]
    • No
  5. How many problems do you want to work on?
    • One
    • More than one

Many students won’t get through all of these questions. The goal is simply to help you adapt your instruction from the very start.

For example, the first question shows the student’s intentions in using the app. If the “Only enough to solve this one” option is chosen, then you should make your explanations even more targeted and relevant to the problem.

What’s Next?

The results from our Review State tests did not show clear advantages in having a 60 second Review State, but this was when no additional facts about the student were provided.

We think the Review State can be made much more effective with the right information. If this turns out to be the case, then a longer Review State may still be a possibility.

Stay tuned for more new features!

–Team Yup

 

Rankings, Session Eligibility & Bug Reporting

Changes to Tutor Rankings

– Starting this week, Tutor Performance Rankings will be calculated based on performance data across a 4-week period.

– For example, rather than receiving a ranking for the week of 8/28 – 9/3, you will receive a ranking based on your cumulative category and pedagogy scores for the 4-week period of 8/7 – 9/3.

– This change will allow tutors who tend to have fewer than 5 sessions per week to be eligible for performance rankings and bonuses.

– Top 10 Performance Bonuses will be calculated using this method starting next week. While your weekly rankings are no longer listed on your Tutor Overview page, you can access this information via your Report Card page. (Note: These bonuses will be added to your workbook data before August payroll is sent out.)

Changes to Eligible Sessions

– We’ve been hoping to make this change for quite some time now and are excited to share the following news with you: As of Rubric 3.0, we are no longer holding tutors accountable for sessions that ended in the Explanation Phase by fault of the student.

– This means only sessions that ended in Gap Bridged and sessions that ended by fault of the tutor in Clarification or Explanation phase will be considered Eligible when assessing your performance. (More specifically, only Bridged sessions and sessions with Tutor Fault tags will be taken into account when calculating Pedagogy and Category scores.)

Reminders about effective Bug Reporting

There are currently three channels for reporting bugs you come across while using the Tutor Dashboard. Below is a reminder for how they should be used:

Tips to ensure effective Bug Reporting:

1. Always include your email, so that we can ask follow up questions.

2. Always include the date, time and time zone so we know when the bug happened.

3. Do your best to be as detailed as possible about how the bug presented itself and how it affected the session/your experience using the platform – even if you think the screenshot speaks for itself. (For example, instead of simply saying “the session is lagging”, say “images are taking a long time to send”, or “messages are showing up out of order”.)

See the Yup Bug Reporting Instructions doc for more information.

 

Let us know what questions you have about these updates! Have a great weekend 🙂

— Team Yup

IMPORTANT: Tutor Review State Updates!

Testing a 60-Second Review State

Twenty seconds isn’t always enough time to think through the student’s first problem, but raising the Review State’s time limit also makes students more likely to cancel sessions before they even begin.

Next week, we’ll start running an experiment to see how increasing the Review State time affects our sessions. To that end, we’ve updated the Review State Guide and created a quiz to test your understanding of it (see below).

How the Experiment Will Work

On the morning of Tuesday, September 5th, at 9am Pacific Daylight Time, the maximum time that you can spend in the Review State will increase from 20 seconds to 60 seconds.

At the same time on the next morning (Wednesday, Sep. 6th) it will return to 20 seconds. The morning after that, it will increase again to 60 seconds, and so on, until the following Tuesday (Sep. 12th) or potentially later.

Updated Tips on How to Use Review State

This link will take you to the updated Yup Tutor Review State Guide.

It explains what we expect of you, as well as what you can expect, when using the Review State to prepare for your session effectively. You will have to read it in order to pass the quiz below.

Show Your Understanding of the Review State

By 5PM Pacific Time on Monday, September 4th, we would like all of you to have taken this short quiz on your Tutor Review State.

— Team Yup