Category: Uncategorized

New Practice Sessions, Outstanding Student Feedback Award, and Reminders

Hi, everyone!

We hope you have had a great week! In preparing for the Outstanding Student Feedback Award it was delightful to read through so many positive comments from students. This is a testament to the encouraging environment that Yup tutors create where students feel confident to take intellectual risks. Thank you for all that you do to help our students!

New Practice Session Feature

Our engineering team deployed a new practice session feature today! When you log in to your tutor dashboard you will now see a Practice Session button.

 

This will open a dynamic session window. We think that this will be most helpful for new tutors who are learning how to use all of the different tools and for all tutors when a new feature is deployed. You can practice using different tools to make the in-session experience more seamless. Check out the clip below to see it in action!

 

 

Thanks to our engineers for their work in creating this helpful feature!

Outstanding Student Feedback Award

Congratulations to Javier Cobos 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 Javier’s exceptional student feedback comments include:

  • “Thank you so much Mr.Cobos for all your help today! I have a much better understanding of this concept now! :)”
  • “10/10 recommend!!!”
  • “best tutor ever!!!”
  • “super nice and helpful he made me enjoy math”
  • “Mr. Cobos with patient, understanding, and thorough”
  • “His explanation of each problem was extremely in depth”
  • “Thank you Mr. Cobos for being so patient with me and all my mistakes!!! Thank you YUP!!!”
  • “Thank you fir being so clear with your explanations, Mr. Cobos!”

Way to go, Javier!

Reminders

Payroll and Attendance Update

Hi, everyone,

This week we are introducing an update to our payroll and attendance systems. In the past, we have used a complicated system of spreadsheets and forms to calculate monthly payroll and monitor attendance. Moving forward we are going to streamline the process by relying on the robust functionality of Humanity and adjusting our attendance expectations. The changes outlined below are in effect for the July pay period.

Payroll

To provide a little more context for the payroll change: we’ve heard a couple of big pain points from tutors with our current system:

  • There are consistent errors in payroll. This is frustrating and undermines your confidence in our systems.
  • Overtime relies on tutors’ self-reporting hours. This hasn’t been very efficient or equitable. Tutors have to spend time reporting their additional hours and if they forget, they will not get paid for the time that they work.
  • Tutors do not consistently receive their pay in a timely manner.

Most of the change will be internal for the Yup team. There are two important points for tutors moving forward:

  1. Tutors no longer need to submit overtime or ERT response via the scheduling form.
  2. Tutors must start and end their shifts accurately on the tutor dashboard. Tutors who forget to end their shifts will receive a warning in their payment summary message.

In order to remove the additional step of reporting overtime and ERT response, we will now be calculating overtime on a monthly basis. The example below shows how a tutor’s overtime hours will be calculated at the end of the month.

You can always view your timesheets on Humanity by clicking the TimeClock feature at the top of the page.

The benefits for tutors in the update to this system are:

  1. More accurate payment
  2. Removal of the extra step to report overtime 
  3. No longer receiving and checking missed minutes messages
  4. Payroll will be completed faster and therefore we will likely be able to pay tutors prior to the 5th of the month

Attendance

In reviewing our attendance policy we realized that our expectations were not equitable across the varied number of hours that tutors are scheduled. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples with our current expectation of 90% attendance:

 

We understand that there are extenuating circumstances where a tutor may be late or need to leave a shift early. While these should be rare occurrences, there should be greater equity in the expectations. In the examples above you can see that a tutor who has a large number of hours scheduled can miss a significant number of shift minutes and still meet our expectations. Our goal is to ensure that tutors are consistently available for our students and attending shifts consistently is a vital part of achieving this. The new expectations for attendance are below.

Equation Editor, Office Hours Recording, and Reminders

Hi, everyone,

We hope you have had a nice week! Thank you so much for updating your availability in Humanity! While the number of hours each tutor is scheduled each week will continue to depend on TGP level and demand, we hope that using this new feature will give you greater ownership over when you are scheduled. As a reminder, you will want to double-check that your availability is correct for the following week every Thursday by 12:00 p.m. If you set recurring hours, there is not a notification when those recurring hours end so it is in your best interest to do a quick double-check. Thank you again for your time on this task and everything that you do to help our students delight in mathematics!

New Equation Editor

The new equation editor for the whiteboard was launched this week! To access the editor, click the pi icon in the toolbar. A window will pop open where you have access to all kinds of equation tools. Check out the short clip below to see it in action!

 

Office Hours: Tutor Ranking System

Thank you to everyone who was able to attend the Office Hours this week where we did a deep dive into the tutor-ranking system. For those of you who were not able to attend, you can watch a recording of the session, here.

We appreciate all of those who voiced concerns and are grateful for the good ideas that came from the discussion on Tuesday. A few things that we will be working on as a result are:

  • developing a database of exceptional sessions so tutors can review and glean ways that they can improve their own work
  • providing more information in the end-of-cycle emails that will provide greater context into understanding TGP levels and more actionable data for improvement

Reminders

New Humanity Availability Feature, Outstanding Student Feedback Award, and Reminders

Hi, everyone,

We hope that you have had a great week! Our session volume remains predictably low, but student feedback has been strong: ratings this week are 96% positive – several points higher than usual. Amazing work everyone! Please take time to read through the remainder of this post which includes an introduction to a new humanity feature, a celebration of excellent work, and reminders.

Humanity Availability Feature

This week, we will be introducing some changes to our scheduling processes. In the past, we’ve used a combination of google forms and individual tutor outreach to determine everyone’s scheduled hours. Moving forward, we are going to replace this process by using the Availability feature on Humanity.

A little more context for this change: we’ve heard a couple of big pain points from tutors with our current system:

  • Tutors must schedule in 3-hour minimum chunks when they may only have one or two hours of availability within a time window. For example, you may want to work 2-4 pm on Tuesday, but you’re only allowed to indicate 12-3 pm OR 3-6 pm on our google form.
  • Schedule changes are granted upon request, requiring tutors to proactively reach out to us and negotiate for hours. This hasn’t been very efficient or equitable.

Using the Humanity availability feature will give you greater control over the time that you are available to tutor with us each week. It will also allow all tutors the same opportunity to adjust their preferred hours in real-time.

A few things to note about the flexibility of the system:

  • You will be able to set recurring availability. So if you will have about the same availability each week, you do not have to change anything after your initial setup. But you can if you would like to.
  • You will continue to be able to pick up open shifts or trades even if they are within the timeframe that you had set as unavailable. 

While there may be slightly more variability in your scheduled hours each week, you will have control over when you are able to work for Yup. The more availability, particularly during peak hours (typically between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. PDT during the school year), the greater potential of reaching your TGP maximum weekly hours.

Please follow the steps outlined below to set your availability for the week of Monday, June 27 – Sunday, July 3. You must set your availability by Wednesday, June 22rd at 8:00 a.m. PDT. If you do not indicate your availability by this time, you will be scheduled for any time frame.

Moving forward the deadline for updating your availability for the following week will be Thursdays at 12:00 p.m. PDT. If you set recurring availability, you can reduce or eliminate the need to make changes each week. 

For all of the processes listed below, there is a video showing the step-by-step process at the bottom of the list.

Set availability:

The process below shows you how to block off time that you are unavailable for shifts on Humanity.

  1. Log in to your Humanity account.
  2. Click Set Availability on the left side of your dashboard
  3. Hover over a date and time on the calendar till you see a plus sign appear.
  4. Click the plus for an hour that you would like to indicate that you are unavailable.
  5. Adjust the time frame 
  6. Click Save.

Set recurring availability:

If you know that you will be unavailable at the same time every week or multiple days every week, you can indicate the time slot as unavailable for recurring days or weeks.

  1. Repeat steps 1-5 from Set Availability above
  2. Click the drop-down menu “Does not Repeat”
  3. Select the frequency that you would like the time slot to be marked unavailable. (Repeats Weekly, Repeats bi-weekly, Repeats Monthly).
  4. Select the days of the week that you would like the time slot to be marked unavailable.
  5. Click Save

Editing availability:

Once you have blocked off a time slot and it displays as unavailable, the only way to edit or adjust the time slot is to delete it and set a new time. To delete:

  1. Click the time slot that is displayed in light red on your availability calendar.
  2. Click the trash can icon.
  3. If this is from a time slot that you had set up as recurring you will be asked if you want to delete this one occurrence or all future occurrences.

 

Outstanding Student Feedback Award

Congratulations to Pralhad Mohan Shinde 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. Students respond positively to Pralhad’s fun and encouraging tone. His kind tone also creates an environment where students feel willing to take intellectual risks.

Some of Pralhad’s exceptional student feedback comments include:

  • “Thanks for helping me out today!! I really needed help with factoring and you helped!”
  • “Thanks for helping me again today!!”
  • “Very patient and will stay till the end until you understand”
  • “Thanks for making everything simple!! I didn’t understand it but now I do!”
  • “Mr. Shinde made it easy for my math problem :D”
  • “Really helpful I understood the lesson really quickly with his help”

Way to go, Pralhad!

Reminders

Student App Update and Reminders

Hi, everyone!

We hope you had a tremendous week! With session volume continuing to decrease due to schools closing for the summer, we thank you so much for using your shift time to complete the How to Engage Young Learners training! We hope that it provided an opportunity to think about the importance of altering vocabulary and solution strategies based on the age of the student that you are working with. We will provide additional training throughout the summer months. As always, thank you for all that you do to empower our students to learn!

Speech to Text on the Student App

There have been many updates to the tutor experience over the last few weeks. One change that students have requested has been deployed! Students can now speak into their microphone (on their mobile device or computer/laptop) and the speech will be converted to text. This will help students who are not confident or fast typers. The speech-to-text feature is quite robust but there may still be some occurrences where the translation is not perfect so keep that in mind when reading student messages. Thank you to the engineers for your work in developing and deploying this feature!

Nominate Yourself for the Tutor Spotlight!

We want to see your highlights! Please nominate yourself so we have the opportunity to view and celebrate your achievements and incredible interactions with students!

Please fill out the Tutor Spotlight Nomination form so we can continue to celebrate the amazing interactions you have with students! A reminder that there is a $25 reward for being featured! 

We are looking for sessions where:

  • The student has a positive experience which is shown by the student:
    • being very willing to do the work.
    • leaving a positive rating.
    • being positive throughout the session.
    • finding solutions to problems that were challenging them.
  • You earned a high rubric score.