NEW FEATURE: Student Grade Level

Student’s Grade Level Now in Tutor Dashboard

Yesterday, we released a feature that collects each student’s grade level via the Yup Bot once per academic year. We then store the grade level for each student in our system and display it in the Tutor Dashboard for each of that student’s sessions.

Using the Students’ Grade Level

The table below summarizes how a few aspects of your sessions should depend on your student’s grade level. As your student’s grade increases, so should the size of your solution steps, the initial amount of participation you can expect, and the complexity of the terms you use.

Note: Review State Auto-Scroll To Be Removed This Week

Later this week, most likely tomorrow (Oct. 11) afternoon, we will remove the automatic scrolling feature from the Review State and improve the questions asked by the Bot.

These changes are the first couple of steps toward addressing your feedback from the pre-session message survey. Thank you to all those who filled it out!

If you have not done so already, please fill out the survey on Stars and Whiteboard 2.0 as well.

— Team Yup

 

Tutor Whiteboard 2.0

Tutor Whiteboard 2.0 has been released!

Try it out at www.yup.com/whiteboard!

This post describes its new features and known issues. 

Text Editing

To use the new text tool:

  1. Click on the “Aa” button
  2. On the whiteboard, drag your mouse down and to the right
    • Known issue: As you’re dragging out the space for the text, you will not see the box growing. It only appears once you release the mouse.
  3. Release the mouse
  4. Click inside the text box to start writing
  5. Press “Enter” or “Return” on your keyboard to finish writing

Here’s where it gets interesting! Click on the mouse cursor button in the top left corner, which lets you select and manipulate any object on your whiteboard except for freehand sketches. With the cursor button selected (not the “Aa” button) you can:

  • Hover over text boxes to see their boundaries
  • Edit the text in the box by double-clicking
    • Remember to press “Enter” or “Return” when finished
  • Drag text boxes around the whiteboard
  • Delete them using the “Delete” or “Backspace” key
  • Resize them using the blue squares on the edges

Shapes

You can now create three new types of shapes: ellipses (using the circle button), triangles (equilateral and isosceles), and straight lines.

Open the menu by clicking on the shapes button, choose a shape, and then close the menu by clicking the shapes button again.

As with the text boxes, you can click on the cursor button and then select, move, resize, and delete the shapes.

Five More New Features

  • Manipulate outside images: You can still drag images from your computer and from many websites (like yupimages.imgur.com) straight onto your whiteboard, drag out the area where you want them to appear, and click on the image icon that appears. Then, you can use the mouse cursor button in the upper left corner to select, move, resize, or delete these too!
  • Eraser: You’ll notice an eraser button, which lets you erase freehand drawings you’ve made with the pencil tool. It cannot erase shapes and text; you’ll need to use the cursor tool and your delete key for those.
  • Redo: Along with the undo button, there is also a Redo button. This feature’s ability to track whiteboard actions hasn’t been perfected, so some actions may be “batched” together.
  • New ‘Clear’ Icon: The new “Clear whiteboard” button is on the bottom-right corner of the whiteboard’s button menu. Look for an icon with an eraser and a rectangle.
  • Always open: During your sessions, the whiteboard is now permanently open for business!

Important: Known Issues

  1. PLEASE DO NOT use the rotate feature until further notice. There are two known issues that should be fixed within the next day or two:
    • Drawing on a rotated board does not work properly.
    • Trying to load an image from the Tutor Chat that has a different orientation than your current board causes the board to go blank. If this happens, just keep rotating the board until the orientations match up. This will let you see and draw on the image.
  2. For technical reasons, the math typing feature has been temporarily disabled. It will return in the next round of improvements.
  3. DO NOT resize text boxes to be smaller than the original text you wrote, as this can cause the resize feature to behave erratically. If this does happen, you may need to refresh your window to clear the whiteboard.

Best of luck using your new whiteboards, and thank you for your patience and flexibility as we work on these issues! Please take the 2-question quiz below to show us that you’ve read and understood this post.

–Team Yup

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