This May we held our first ever Tutor Town Hall event. We’ve had lots of requests for an event like this, that opens up the lines of communication between you and us, and gives you the chance to meet some of the people behind MyTutor!
Those people were Georgia (Head of Tutors), Jess (Senior Product Manager), Nicola (Chief Marketing Officer), and Florence (General Manager of the Schools Programme). Here are the four key takeaways, according to those that came:
- How MyTutor communicates with schools about teacher notes 📝
- The money that we reinvest in MyTutor 💸
- Camera usage and lesson recordings 📸
- Our work on the Tutor App 🤳
How MyTutor communicates with schools about teacher notes 📝
We know that sometimes teacher notes aren’t high quality enough, and appreciate how frustrating that can be. The reality is that teachers are incredibly time-poor, and it’s not always possible for them to prioritise filling in detailed notes alongside everything else that they’re dealing with.
But we know how important those notes are for you and for the quality of your sessions, so our school Relationship Managers have introductory calls with schools and make clear the importance of filling out their Pupil Details form thoroughly – in fact it’s compulsory for it to be filled in, and we literally can’t set up a programme if they’re not!
Then our school operations team quality assure the form, and follow up with schools and teachers if they aren’t filled in correctly. We’re also continuing to work with teachers to understand how to make these processes as easy and as effective as possible, and hope to keep improving them.
If you ever come to a first lesson with no topics listed for you to cover, it’s worth getting to know the pupil to understand what they like or dislike about the subject, and what they find challenging. You could also set a short quiz to get a better understanding of what they know so you can tailor your lessons accordingly.
The money that we reinvest in MyTutor 💸
One of the main areas of spend is marketing, to bring you a steady stream of customers. This includes our TV ad, social media content (starring lots of you) and PR, which drive an understanding of the benefits of tuition and MyTutor. And then of course we want to ensure we’re capturing those parents who are already in the market for a tutor, by making sure we’re the brand they click on when they search for “maths tutor” online.
It takes a parent booking lots of tutorials for us to pay that back, as we’re still in a relatively new category and need to spend time, money and resource to cement ourselves as category leaders. And that’s before site maintenance, improvements to our product (like our new group offering that will allow us to provide more work during the quieter holiday periods) and other operational costs.
Camera usage and lesson recordings 📸
For a couple of reasons, it’s really important that from the moment a student is in the lesson space, your camera and microphone are on. The first is for Safeguarding purposes, and the second is because of how important it is to build good relationships with your students and deliver really engaging lessons. You’ll only be expected to have your camera and mic on when your student is in the lesson space.
Safeguarding is also the reason we record lessons – so that if you, a school, or a parent gets in touch about an issue that happened during the lesson, we’re able to investigate them. Lesson recordings are also used as part of our feedback programme on the schools side of MyTutor, and as a revision tool for students to look back on. Remember that the recording starts as soon as you arrive in the lesson space!
Recordings are available to watch back by students for 90 days after the lesson takes place, but are kept on our system for a total of 125 days.
For safeguarding reasons, tutors aren’t able to view lesson recordings because we’re not able to distribute video recordings of pupils – and safeguarding is also the reason tutors can’t opt out of their lessons being recorded.
Our work on the tutor app 🤳
We’re excited to share that we’re aiming to release the first version of the new app for on-the-day school work next term, and for all school work over summer. We’re hoping to fully replace the full functionality of the old app by the end of the year!
We’re also pleased to share that you’ll be able to see information about a lesson before accepting a new slot via the new app. Further down the line we’re also hoping to prioritise how A-Level school lessons are managed, which we appreciate could be better.
We also had some questions about making small fixes to the old app in the meantime. The reason we can’t is because the current mobile app is built on an old code framework that means any change, however small, requires a significant amount of time and effort. We’ve chosen to dedicate that time and effort into rebuilding the app on a new framework, that we’re able to maintain more effectively, solving some of the other larger problems in the process. We’re very aware of all the issues and bugs with the current mobile app which is why we are so committed to this project!
So what next?
We appreciate not everybody could make this event – we hosted it outside of our peak times to give you all the best chance to attend, and hope those who missed it can join us for the next one. Thanks to those who shared their feedback – we’ll be using it to help shape what future versions of the Tutor Town Hall look like!
As always, if you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you. You can reach us on tutors@mytutor.co.uk or 0203 773 6024.