New Key Tag Policies

Key Tags for Quality Assurance

A few months ago, we introduced a policy that places tutors who receive 5 or more Key Tags in a given week under review for contract termination. (As a reminder, key tags include Gave Answer, Wrong Answer or Insufficient Content Knowledge.)

Because our tutors complete varying numbers of sessions each week, we will be updating this policy to reflect the percentage of sessions that receive key tags rather than a set number.

Starting next week, meeting one or more of the following conditions for a given week will be grounds for contract termination: 

5% or more of sessions tagged as Gave Answer,
10% or more of sessions tagged as Wrong Answer,
10% or more of sessions tagged as Insufficient Content Knowledge,
20% or more of sessions tagged with any of the above key tags.

While we understand that everyone makes mistakes from time to time, it is unacceptable for a significant portion of your sessions to receive these key tags as they reflect poorly on our service.

Key Tags on New User Sessions

Starting next week, key tags applied to new user sessions will be given higher weight in our Quality Assurance system.

For services like ours, first impressions are everything! The chances of a user abandoning or canceling their subscription are highest in the early days of their time with Yup.

Starting next week, key tags applied to new user sessions will carry the weight of 1.5 tags. See the recent New User flag feature post for more information on how to identify when the student you are working with is a New User.

While new user sessions should be treated the same as any other session (we should be at our best with all users!), we do ask that you put extra care and attention into your interactions with new users. That being said, new users may not yet understand how Yup works; you may need to encourage more participation, push more information, and/or let the user know that their engagement and open communication will help you assist them.

Keep up the great work and email tutor.support@yup.com to let the Operations team know if you have any questions.

Note: if you have not watched the PlayPosit videos detailed in the previous post, please do so as soon as you get a chance!

— Team Yup

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New Video: Pushing Information

PLAYPOSIT VIDEO TASK

Recently, we have introduced a number of features and policies that place greater importance on pushing information to stuck students. So far, however, we haven’t provided much concrete advice about doing so!

With this in mind, we have added a brand new video quiz to our “Adapting to Students” series on PlayPosit. To watch the video, simply login to your PlayPosit.com account. (If you have not received PlayPosit credentials, email tutor.support@yup.com.)

In the previous video, “Adapting to Student Knowledge”(as mentioned in a recent News Feed post), we briefly discuss teaching in a way that will increase the likelihood of your students answering your guiding questions correctly. The newest video greatly expands on this, describing actionable guidelines on multiple ways of pushing information.

Addressing users’ top concerns (explanation clarity and teaching speed, currently) and continuously improving our ability to do so is utterly crucial to Yup’s success. For that reason, we’re making these two video quizzes mandatory and attaching a bonus for completion:

 

– Complete both video quizzes before January 1st to earn two hours of bonus pay

– Failure to complete these mandatory training exercises before the above deadline will result in a penalty of 1 strike


We hope you find the video helpful, and if you have any questions or concerns about it, please email tyler@yup.com.

— Team Yup

New User Flag and “IDK” Alerts

As you may have noticed, one new feature was added to your Tutor Dashboard this week, and one more will be added before the week is over! Please read more about them below and answer the questions at the end of this post.

NEW USER FLAG

Whenever a session you’ve claimed is the first or second session that your student has submitted, you should now see this extra field at the top of your tutor dashboard:

New users are the least acquainted with our service and have the highest risk of misunderstanding how Yup works or having a bad experience. It’s up to you to show them how much help and confidence our service can give them!

Our service plans have changed to become longer-term and more expensive, making it all the more crucial to give new users a great learning experience. For that reason, we are preparing to give these New User sessions greater weight in our QA system. We hope you’ll use this New User feature to give extra attention to how new users behave and how best to work with them.

“IDK” Messages

Several weeks ago, we saw that a strong predictor of your percentage of Gap Bridged sessions is the rate at which your questions are answered with phrases like “i don’t know” or “not sure” by the student. This rate is also correlated with the percentage of your sessions that receive “Confusing Explanation” feedback from the student.

To address this, we’ve built a new alerting feature that should be deployed today. Whenever your student sends a message like “i don’t know,” “idk,” or “i’m not sure” more than once within a seven-minute time period (we’ll experiment with this time period to optimize it) you’ll see the following message in your chat window:

The aim is to keep the importance of pushing information at the front of your mind, which should decrease the difficulty students have in answering your questions or following your explanations.

We acknowledge this feature’s limits; for example, some “idk” messages are absolutely necessary when probing the student’s knowledge. Also, a few students will say “idk” to any question you ask when they don’t want to participate. Again, this is aimed at encouraging tactful information-pushing, and note that we are not currently tying any new policies to this feature.

The student will not see this alert, but you will be able to see it in your session history. We thank you in advance for your patience as we fine-tune this feature, and look forward to gathering your feedback on it!

— Team Yup


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Adapting to Student Knowledge

PLAYPOSIT VIDEO TASK

A few weeks ago, we invited a number of randomly selected Yup tutors to watch a PlayPosit training video entitled ‘Adapting to Student Knowledge’. The video outlines general strategies for using guiding questions to move sessions forward quickly while aligning with students’ abilities. 

We found that after being asked to review this video, not only did the selected tutors demonstrate higher gap bridged percentages, but students left less “confusing explanation” feedback and more “fast teaching” feedback on the tutors’ sessions.

If you haven’t already done so, please log in to PlayPosit, watch the video, and answer the interactive quiz questions. The video is less than 6 minutes long and, at the end of the video, you’ll have the chance to leave feedback; please let us know about anything you found either confusing or helpful. We hope you find it informative!

If you have not yet received your PlayPosit credentials or need help logging in, please email tutor.support@yup.com.

— Team Yup

Discussion:

NEW Pre-Session Questions

UPDATE November 22nd, 2017: Due to unforeseen tutor dashboard issues that were resolved today, all parts of the feature below will be pushed out next week (week of November 27th) rather than this week. Also, the feature will be available for both iOS and Android, although the bot questions will remain an iOS-only feature for now.

Big changes are coming to the Yup iOS mobile app. Soon, we’ll require all iOS users to answer the questions “Have you done a similar problem before?” and “Have you started working on the problem?” before they request a tutor, rather than after:

This means that you’ll be able to see the answers to these questions in your Review State as soon as you claim a session with an iOS userYou won’t see them in the bot conversation, however. Instead, there will be new fields for these two answers at the top of your Tutor Dashboard:

Showing you these answers at the start of nearly every session should ensure that your first questions about the student’s progress and prior knowledge are always as customized and informative as possible.

For example, if the student has not made progress, start with questions about what they feel stuck on and what they know. If the student hasn’t done similar problems before, be ready to push information and examples quickly.

While these fields will appear on your Tutor Dashboard early this week,  you won’t start seeing the students’ answers until we release the new version of the iOS app later in the week. Going forward, we will continue using the Yup bot to test different ways of preparing the student with helpful tips and more detailed questions.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or concerns about this feature. Use it wisely!

— Team Yup

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