Category: Announcements

NEW TQM Training Course

Interested in increasing your involvement with Yup?

Tutor Quality Managers (TQMs) use their in-depth understanding of Yup’s policies and standards to assess their peers in the form of Session Feedback. We are introducing an optional TQM training course made up of six interactive videos which detail how sessions are categorized, scored and tagged. Each video contains practice questions, giving you a chance to provide feedback on real Yup sessions. These videos will also give you valuable insight into how your sessions are graded. The entire course should take less than an hour to finish and can be completed at your own pace.

If you are interested in participating in the course and being considered for the role of TQM, simply go to playposit.com and log in with your assigned credentials. If you are newer to Yup and have not yet received PlayPosit login details, or if you no longer have access to your login and password, let us know at tutor.support@yup.com.

— Team Yup

 

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

 

Interpreting Session Feedback

Rubric 3.0 has been in effect for more than two months now, and we have noticed several questions frequently arising about how to interpret session feedback. To address any confusion, we are posting the following guide on interpreting session feedback in terms of TQM comments, rubric scores, and tags.

TQM COMMENTS

You may have noticed recently that fewer TQM comments are being left on sessions.  This is due to the fact that TQMs have been instructed to only comment on a session if:

1.  Standard 1.1 (Probing) received a NO

and/or

2. The “Inappropriate Behavior” tag changed from YES to NO

We chose to highlight rubric standard 1.1 because it measures how well a session starts off – this is one of the most important factors in determining whether a session reaches Gap Bridged. The comment should guide you to successfully pull valuable information from students in future sessions.

Including comments when overturning the “Inappropriate Behavior” tag will ensure that you understand why the student’s behavior wasn’t considered inappropriate. Because using the inappropriate behavior scripted message can lead to a student being blocked from using our platform, it’s important that everyone is on the same page with its usage.

RUBRIC STANDARDS

When TQMs mark NO for a given standard, they must justify why they did so. (We can see these justifications in the screenshot below next to the ❌s). The justifications help replace TQM comments with concise explanations that capture why points were taken off.  

TAGS

Have you ever received a “Suggest Refund” tag, but couldn’t figure out why? All “Suggest Refund” tags are accompanied by a Tutor Fault Tag, which means reviewing the Tags section of your feedback report should give you a better understanding of the refund. For example in the image below, we can see that the session was suggested for refund as a result of the “Left abruptly” tag.

The only situation where we can see a Tutor Fault Tag with no “Suggest Refund” tag is when between 2 minutes and 5 minutes are taken to respond to a student. The “Slow response” tag is automatically applied by our system whenever 2+ minutes go by without responding to the student, however the “Suggest Refund” tag is only applied when 5+ minutes go by without responding to the student.

To find out more about our tags, please review Session Categorization and Tags.

We hope this clarifies any confusion you may have about your session feedback. If you still have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out!

— Team Yup

 

Scheduling + SotW & Bonuses

SCHEDULING REMINDER

Session traffic is reaching record numbers and we need your help to make sure students are being matched with tutors! If you are interested in adding more hours to your weekly schedule, don’t forget to fill out the ‘Add More Hours’ option on the Scheduling Matters form to tell us when you’re available.

Know someone who might be a good match for the Yup Tutor Team? Earn a $25 referral bonus for sending us a successful applicant and an additional $25 when they reach 40 hours as a tutor!

SESSION OF THE WEEK

Congratulations to Session of the Week winner, Julie House! Awesome work using adapted guiding questions to push the student in the right direction.

Here’s what the student had to say about the session:

“Thank you, that was the last problem on my homework and if I got it wrong then I would be stuck with an ugly F. You saved my straight A’s. Positive attitude, Fast typing, Clear explanation.”

– Nathan in California

Nominate one of your own exceptional sessions via the submission form and you could win a $25 bonus!

PERFORMANCE BONUS RECIPIENTS

Congratulations to the following tutors who achieved a Top Ten tutor ranking for two or more consecutive weeks, earning them a $25 performance bonuses. Great work!

– Adrian Chalabe ??
– Finka Bankovic ??
– Kevin McGann Osborne ?
– Manav Sharma ??
– Mehrnaz Siavoshi ?
– Namburi M Krishna Varma ??
– Pralhad Mohan Shinde ?
– Sejal Kothari ?
– Steve Park ??

(? = Number of bonuses between 9/3 – 9/17)

Happy tutoring!

— 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