Category: Policy Updates

Autumn at Yup Webinar + Student Feedback Award

CHANGES FOR AUTUMN 2019 + WEBINAR

The webinar will be hosted by our new Director, Kreg Moccia.

Hope everyone is having a fantastic summer! Here at Yup HQ, we are gearing up for a number of new initiatives for the coming school year. In order to prepare for a new go-to-market strategy which could potentially increase our userbase substantially, Ops is redesigning how we test and qualify applicants, schedule tutors, and incentivize tutor growth and performance. The infographic below outlines these changes more in depth.

In order to fully introduce the tutor team to the changes to come, we will be holding a live webinar on Thursday, August 1st at 9:00AM PDT, hosted by our new Director of Tutor Operations, Kreg Moccia. The webinar will touch on all areas of the scaling program, but will focus on the new Tutor Incentive Program.

Looking forward to visiting with you all next week in the webinar! Check your emails for a Google Calendar invite with the Zoom webinar link.

OUTSTANDING STUDENT FEEDBACK AWARD 

Congratulations to Paul Jason Carolino for earning the Outstanding Student Feedback Award! This award is given to tutors who receive consistent, outstanding written feedback from students over several weeks along with demonstrating excellent overall performance.

Some of Paul’s exceptional student feedback comments include:

  • “Mr. Carolino you’re amazing!!! Thank you so much for your help. It was so helpful. You don’t know how much I appreciate it!!!”
  • “Awesome tutor! Thank you SO much for believing in me!!!! I dont come across as great of a tutor as you everyday, so thanks for all your help!”
  • “Thank you very much Mr. Carolino, I appreciate your help because you have made me understand what the question was asking. You are a hero!”

 

Happy tutoring!

— Team Yup

Bug Reporting Procedure + Updates/Reminders

NEW BUG REPORTING PROCEDURE

Starting immediately, we ask that you use the Tutor Dashboard’s built-in Report Bug button to let us know about technical issues you face.

We invite you to continue to use the #system_issues room on slack to communicate with other tutors about bugs after reporting via Report Bug (UserSnap).  Additionally, if a bug you are facing is significantly impacting your shift, please continue to let us know via tutor.support@yup.com.

Using the ‘REPORT BUG’ Button (UserSnap)

STEP 1
Click the ‘Report Bug’ button on the bottom right of your tutor dashboard to launch the bug reporting screen.

STEP 2
Use the pen tool to mark your screenshot if necessary and use the comment box to tell us more about the bug.

        • Do your best to be as detailed as possible about how the bug presented itself, and/or how it affected the session, or your experience using the platform (even if you think the screenshot is self-explanatory!)
        • For example, instead of saying the session is lagging, try saying messages/images/whiteboard are taking a long time to send, or messages are out of order/repeating in the session.
        • Always include your email, the date, time and time zone in order to better find and investigate bugs reported.

STEP 3
Click “Send” when you are done illustrating and explaining the bug that you are experiencing.

Check out the Yup Bug Reporting Instructions doc for more details.

TUTORING UPDATES/REMINDERS

  • PRE-SESSION QUESTION TIP
    • Use the canned responses filed under Initial Probing along with the student’s answers to the pre-session questions to speed up Gap Clarification Phase.
      • For example, if they indicate that have solved similar problems, you might utilize the following canned response:“Looks like you’ve done similar problems before! Based on those, do you have any ideas about what we could try here?”
  • ACHIEVEMENTS UPDATE
    • As of this month, Yup tutors have sent over 15,000 Achievements to students! The team’s favorite Achievement to send is All-Star Answer with close to 7,000 awarded since the feature launched in late November 2018. Let’s keep this trend going, all!
    • The record for most Achievements sent in a single session is Session #406409 in which veteran tutor Bharathi Vavilakolanu sent 26 Achievements over 108 minutes!

Keep up the great work and happy tutoring!

— Team Yup

Tutor Survey, Answer Checks + Inactivity

FEBRUARY SURVEY REMINDER: If you haven’t already done so, please take a moment to take the quick February Tutor Satisfaction Survey!

NEW ANSWER CHECK POLICY

Starting immediately, we will be taking a new approach for sessions in which students come to us with solutions to be checked rather than problems to be solved:

  • While most sessions are submitted by users who need help solving, some students have already solved and simply need their answer confirmed
  • This new policy gives tutors the go-ahead to confirm answers at face value, as long as they at least encourage the student to share work before confirming the answer

Read more in the infographic below:

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to tutor.support@yup.com with questions about this!

INACTIVE STUDENT REMINDERS

Late last year, we removed faulty automatic system timers that were (unreliably) ending sessions in which students were inactive for a set amount of time.

Since this change, it has been up to the tutor to end the session when a student becomes inactive – after sending the appropriate canned response. See below for reminders for inactive student procedure.

  • There are two situations in which you are expected to manually end the session due to inactivity so you can be rematched
    • The student does not send a message to the chatroom within 2 minutes of the session beginning
    • The student does not respond to a question for 5 minutes and is unresponsive when checked on
  • Once the session has concluded and the student confirms that they don’t have more problems/questions, it is acceptable to end the session before 5 minutes have passed
    • For example, if you have said goodbye to the student and they don’t end the session, end the session manually so you can be rematched.

 

Happy Tutoring!

— Team Yup

Practice Dashboard + Internet Connectivity

NEW: PRACTICE SESSION DASHBOARD

Introducing the Practice Session dashboard! The Engineering team created this invaluable training tool for both new and veteran tutors alike – a mock tutor dashboard that allows you to interact with all the features of a real session chatroom, but with a training “bot” rather than a student.

The Practice Session dashboard can be accessed from the dashboard menu at your convenience (see image) or by going to yup.com/tutor_dashboard/chat_practice. The bot will then guide you through various exercises that show off all that the dashboard has to offer. Practice your whiteboard skills, check out the content card library, or simply make yourself more comfortable using the Yup platform to teach!

INTERNET CONNECTIVITY POLICY + SURVEY

Another recent feature Engineering has developed for Tutor Operations is a system allowing us to monitor the quality of tutors’ network connections while in a shift. Now that this feature is up and running, we are concerned to see that many Yup tutors do not have sufficient bandwidth to reliably connect to the Tutor Dashboard, often leading to session issues, high pass rates for tutors and high drop rates for students.

It should go without saying that having a reliable internet connection is fundamental to working for Yup. In the coming weeks, we will be rolling out a new policy surrounding internet quality – this will likely involve bonus incentives for tutors who improve their poor speed, along with negative consequences for those who fail to do so.

If your internet speed is not consistently at or above 5 – 10 mbps, we strongly recommend that you reach out to your internet service provider ASAP to upgrade your network plan, or explore other options for internet connection.

In order to give us a better understanding of any internet or Tutor Dashboard issues you may be facing, we ask that you complete the following mandatory survey before Wednesday, January 16th.


> > INTERNET SURVEY < <

 

Thank you for your participation – have a great week, all!

— Team Yup

 

Slack Tutor Chat + Shift Endings

SLACK TUTOR CHAT

If you are assigned a problem you are unsure about, please take a moment to upload the student’s image in the tutor-chat channel in Slack. Tagging all online tutors using the @here tag will alert your fellow tutors, along with any online TQMs, that you need assistance. If you need a moment to wait for another tutor to respond, politely let the student know that you are working on their problem, thanking them for their patience.

If you are online and receive a @here notification from a tutor struggling with a problem, please take a moment to provide assistance. If you are with a student when you’re tagged, the student takes precedence – however if you have any capacity to help please try your best to do so.


SHIFT ENDING POLICY UPDATE

Starting January 1, 2019, we are updating our policies surrounding ending your shift and overtime compensation. Here are the two changes to the policy:

  1. It will no longer be acceptable to pass sessions towards the end of a shift.
    1. Tutors will be expected to accept incoming requests throughout the entirety of their shifts. This will ensure students are connected in a reasonable time frame and have a great experience with Yup.
    2. Tutors should only claim temporary shifts or takeovers if they are available to extend into overtime. Due to the unpredictable nature of session length, please anticipate the possibility of needing to extend every shift you work by at least 30 minutes.
    3. If there are shifts in your existing weekly schedule that you cannot potentially extend into overtime, it is important to email scheduling@yup.com as soon as possible so we can adjust your schedule accordingly.
  2.  In order to reward and incentivize overtime, we will be increasing the overtime rate from 1.5x your normal hourly wage to 2x your hourly wage starting January 2019.


This policy change aims to address an issue we’ve been seeing with dropped (unclaimed) sessions. It also helps us avoid situations where tutors have to leave mid-solution due to their shift being over, a common area concern for students and parents.

Let us know what questions you have!


— Team Yup