alymurray

Do you mean that you didn't want to be labeled "low-income"? If so, I relate. There were definitely periods when I was growing up that I was eligible for free or reduced price lunch but was too embarrassed to accept it.

We try to avoid using the word "low-income" in all of our student-facing communications for exactly this reason. For example, this is how we talk about eligibility on the students' page of our website (https://upchieve.org/students):

"Is This Really Free? YES! UPchieve is a nonprofit organization that exists to help students achieve their academic goals. Any student whose family can’t afford a private tutor or admissions consultant is eligible for free tutoring and college counseling through UPchieve. Instead of charging you, we rely on volunteers and donations to provide you with free academic support."

One of my long-term goals with UPchieve is actually to destigmatize being a low-income student. It's obviously not the student's fault if their family can't afford something. (In fact, it's probably not their parents' fault either.) Not sure exactly how we'll do this yet, but I hope that we can :)

If I'm understanding your question correctly, it's neither! It's something you'd draw on with your mouse or trackpad on a laptop. We also have other tools you can use to make it easier to tutor math (e.g., ability to add text and shapes to the whiteboard, ability to upload photos of homework, etc.). If you want to see exactly what it looks like, check out this demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SufRUje0XiM

In the future, we actually do plan to add audio to the platform as an optional feature that students can turn on. Most students prefer the text-based communication of our current platform, but there are definitely some who would use audio if given the choice. We still need to think through how to get mutual buy-in from both the student and volunteer in that session as well as whether we want to do additional background screening for volunteers who want to use that feature.

Nice!! Thanks for sharing your experience! Completely agree that virtual tutoring (with no audio/video) definitely helps eliminate some of the potential for discrimination bias.

We've considered it, but one concern that I have is that the paid tutoring space is actually pretty saturated. We'd then be competing with all of those other sites to acquire middle and high income student/parent customers. Maybe we'd be able to get some market share if we played up the impact piece, but I'm still worried it would distract us from our main focus of helping low-income students get to college.

Woo, I am so excited to hear that you signed up and already tried taking a quiz! Appreciate all the feedback, and we will definitely work on the things you mentioned. Feel free to reach out via the AC community slack if you ever need anything - hopefully we get to meet at a coach meeting sometime!

Great suggestions! We partner with some other nonprofits similar to QuestBridge (e.g., College Track), but we're not yet partnered with QuestBridge. It sounds like we should be though—it's awesome to hear how impactful they were on your life!

Re: tutoring in other languages, I completely agree it's needed. We hope we can add tutoring in at least Spanish in the next two years. We've already started asking volunteers during onboarding what other languages they speak, but as of now we don't have enough volunteers fluent in other languages to launch tutoring in those languages.

Thanks! I hope we end up sustainable too. :)

I also did a lot of paid tutoring for more privileged kids in HS and college, so I can relate. Fortunately that experience ended up being very useful in starting UPchieve!

Based on your past experiences, it sounds like you'd be an awesome volunteer! If you want to just learn more about the volunteer experience you can check out this page on our site: https://upchieve.org/volunteer

I completely agree that students in other countries need this too! We decided to start with just the US for two main reasons: 1) we thought the more narrow focus to start would increase our chance of success, and 2) we don't feel we're knowledgable enough to effectively execute on this idea in other countries yet. For example, to offer UPchieve in another country, we'd have to know how to identify if a student is low-income in that country as well as how the typical high school courses in that country match up to the current tutor certifications on our platform.

Since we're open source, I think it'd actually be awesome if someone in another country decided to start their own version of UPchieve for that country!

Woot! I love that sentiment. :) Hope I get to meet you on our volunteer community slack or at one of the (optional) volunteer meetings in the future!

Typically students find us and use us on their own (no parental involvement). We don't market our site towards parents at all. The result is that most of the students using our site actually DO want to be there, and they are often very grateful for the help.

It's really common for students to thank their tutors at the end of the session and leave comments in the post-session feedback form saying how awesome the tutor was. Right now we're just sharing that feedback with the volunteers ad hoc, but we'd like to find a better system to share it regularly.

We're also planning to launch a volunteer favoriting feature for students later this year, which will increase the likelihood of students and volunteers who get along well having future sessions with each other. It's actually a commonly requested feature from both students and volunteers!

Completely agree that this is what it comes down to. We see it as our responsibility to make it hard to use the platform in that way, and of course to respond appropriately if something does happen, but ultimately we cannot control the behavior of students or volunteers. The only way to keep a child completely safe is to never let them interact with anyone (including family)!

Hey Peter! :) Thanks for asking! Some of the things we want to do over the next year include:

1) Expand to offer more subjects. Students ask us all the time for tutoring in English and history. Someday we hope to offer tutoring in every common high school course, including foreign languages and computer science too!

2) Improve the reliability of the site. We have something like 100x as many tutoring sessions happening every day as we did last year, and we need to make substantial changes to the platform to keep up with the usage.

3) Upskill our volunteers to improve the quality of tutoring offered on the site. We want to offer additional training courses on tutoring skills and implement a peer feedback system so volunteers can help each other improve.

4) Reach more students! We want to get the word out to as many students as possible about our free service. If anyone reading can make an intro to a high school or nonprofit who needs us, we'd greatly appreciate your help.

We'd love to figure out ways to reward volunteers for their service via badges/certificates, letters of recommendation, or potentially even college credits (e.g., if we could convince teaching colleges to give their students credit for tutoring students on UPchieve)!

Recruiting retired teachers could be a good option for us too since they have the expertise of a highly trained teacher without the cost. At a minimum, I agree we need to invest even more into the training of the volunteers!

Volunteer side is open to anyone, anywhere (assuming they are 13+, can get through our screening process, and can pass one of our certification quizzes).

Student side is currently only open to low-income high school students in the US who are 13+. Eligibility is based on a combination of the income demographics of their high school and zip code, but even students who don't pass the "quick check" can apply for access if they feel they are eligible.

https://gitlab.com/upchieve

Do you mind me asking what site you tried doing online tutoring for? I'd love to hear more about your experience (both the positives + negatives)!

On our site, students seem to really like the text-based communication because it creates what we call a "judgment-free zone". They have time to think through what they want to say and can end up less embarrassed to admit when they don't understand something.

On the tutor side... yes, it does require the tutors to be particularly engaging and patient. :) Our best tutors try to gauge students' understanding often and ask lots of questions to elicit active participation. Like anything, it just gets easier with practice!

I like your idea about recording the whole session, and it's something I think we should do for numerous reasons, including student safety, volunteer training, and the ability for those recordings to be used for academic research to better understand tutoring. I think depending on the file size it could get quite expensive to store them, but I'll defer to Dave on that!

One thing we probably won't do any time soon is make a library of past sessions available publicly to students. We want to stay firmly in the category of live, personalized support so that we don't overlap with sites like Khan Academy (videos) or Quora/Stack Overflow (asynchronous support).

We do really want to expand our volunteer training and get volunteers to provide feedback to their peers on their sessions though, and I agree the recorded sessions would help a lot with that!

Great ideas, thank you for sharing! I'm also really excited about the potential of current student users to become tutors in the future. Community service is a great way for high school students to build their college applications too, so I think there are actually probably students who would want to use UPchieve both as a student and a volunteer at the same time. Right now our platform would require them to have two accounts, but it's something that we might try to facilitate in the future.

Thank you so much for sharing your personal connection! I really relate and wish I'd had more mentors growing up too. But at least we can change that for future students! I look forward to hearing your feedback and if we're lucky maybe even having you volunteer with us :)

I knew it was only a matter of time until we got this question. Thanks for asking—it’s important and definitely something we’re concerned about!

We try to prevent abuse through a few measures:

1) The platform is only available to students who are 13+ , and we encourage both students and volunteers to keep their conversations focused on academics. When in a session, students and volunteers only see each other’s first names (which is not a lot to go off of, considering we have users across the country and even some international volunteers).

2) Before volunteers can begin working with students, they have to go through our screening process. Volunteers provide a picture of their photo ID and two references who we contact and ask about their suitability to work with children. A human being reviews all reference forms and runs the name from their ID through the National Sex Offenders Registry.

3) Tutoring sessions on our platform are completed using a whiteboard and text-based chat (no audio and video). We have a chat filter that prevents inadvertent attempts to exchange personal information like phone numbers and emails, and we also block links out to common third-party video conferencing sites like Zoom.

4) Students and volunteers can rate and report each other, and we read through the chat logs of most of the sessions on our platform. Sessions can get flagged for review for tons of different reasons. This is the piece of our process that is least scalable, and we’re still looking for ways to balance quality assurance and safety with scalability.

We give volunteers review materials to help them brush up, and to be honest... even the best tutors have to Google things occasionally to refresh their memories during a live tutoring session. :) But yeah, it does take some investment on the part of the volunteer if they haven't looked at a specific subject in 5+ years.

Woo, first comment! Thanks, endisneigh.

Supply is definitely going to be a challenge for us in the long term. We think we’ll need over a million volunteers someday to support all 8 million low-income HS students in the US. However, at least during COVID-19, we found it really easy to recruit volunteers because everyone was looking for virtual opportunities. At one point we amassed a wait list of over 10K people who wanted to volunteer with us.

I think one thing we have going in our favor in the long run is that we designed the volunteer opportunity to be convenient enough that even busy professionals should be able to take part. Volunteers have complete control over their own schedule and how much time they want to work with students in any given week/month/year.

One study found that 50% of Americans say that they want to give back but can’t because of time and schedule constraints. About a third of Americans are college-educated and likely able to tutor at least one subject, so that puts us at about 50M potential volunteers just in the US who might be both qualified and interested in our volunteer opportunity.

Through corporate partnerships with big companies and potentially even clubs on college campuses, we’re hopeful we can recruit enough volunteers to meet student demand in perpetuity. And to address your point about recruiting for harder subjects… another thing we have in our favor is that the distribution of individuals qualified to help with different subjects matches up pretty well with the distribution of students needing help in different subjects. Our most popular subjects on the platform are actually lower-level math subjects like Algebra 1 and Geometry, and those are also the subjects volunteers are most likely to get certified in.