[endisneigh]

I've seen similar programs like this - generally the issue is with the supply side. Volunteering generally isn't enough to overcome the gap. How do you plan to resolve this issue? This becomes more of a problem as the content becomes more complicated (e.g. even a smart person working at a great company would have to brush up on physics, so either you're dealing with an inherently scarce set of people who remember high school physics, or another scarce set of people who willing to brush up on physics to tutor individuals for free).

[alymurray]

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.

[redkoala]

It would be good if your non-profit's economic model eventually allows you to hire a core team of trained teachers and supplement with volunteers. You can also allow college students to mentor high school students for credit experience and offer a letter of experience.

[alymurray]

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!

[llaolleh]

You're absolutely right. I think the biggest barrier would be brushing up on these topics. I haven't touched these subjects in 5+ years. Teaching requires one more plane of understanding.

[thedevelopnik]

Dave, UPchieve CTO here. A really cool thing that's happened over the last year is we've gotten lots of volunteer sign ups from retired people, who were really trapped at home from fear of COVID, who have lots of time to brush up on physics/calculus/etc. I don't think that's something we could have predicted about the marketplace of students/volunteers but has helped a lot. Even now that things are opening up, they're staying with us and continuing to pick up lots of sessions. They enjoy the mentorship aspect and brushing up on the academics is a fun thing for them to do.

[alymurray]

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.

[ghufran_syed]

I think that’s a feature, not a bug - part of the reason I’d like to tutor high school calculus students is so I have an excuse to revise that stuff again - I finished an MS in math and statistics last year, but it’s probably been 8 years since I last did high school / freshman calculus :)