[btown]

I imagine the set of volunteers willing to commit just an hour in advance to being available for, say, the following two hours, is much more massive than the set of volunteers able to commit to continuity for weeks or months. But continuity of mentorship and long-term trust can be absolutely critical for many learners.

Do you see yourselves taking a hybrid approach to this to optimize on that spectrum? Can someone get involved if their schedule is too unpredictable to do anything but the former? As a startup cofounder who would love to teach, I’m very much asking for myself :)

[thedevelopnik]

Volunteers can set availability, but they can also just hang out on their dashboard. As student requests come in, we immediately show them on the volunteer dashboard where a volunteer can immediately pick them up, and only start texting people if the request is not taken up. We offer optional browser notifications when new requests come in. So it's totally possible to volunteer with us on an ad-hoc basis!

To your excellent point about continuity, relationships are definitely a component of effective tutoring, but in our user research and conversations with students, students themselves told us it was more important to be able to get help when they need it than to be able to get help from the same person every time, and that's the need we've decided to optimize for.

[idiotsecant]

I think as someone who would be further in the volunteer category than the student category (probably most folks in HN i would wager) The thing I get out of it is the relationship. I get the little ego boost of knowing that the particular kid i'm working with appreciates and needs my help. If I am being randomly paired with one of 100 random kids, 75 of which are being sat in front of the computer as 'productive' babysitting by their parents I might have less of a rewarding experience.

Is there some mechanism by which volunteers can find an appreciative student and re-match with them exclusively?

[alymurray]

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!

[idiotsecant]

That's good to hear that you've been marketing it in a way that discourages parents from using it as free babysitting, or worse, punishment! I hope that you can manage to keep it that way. Every source of free tutoring I've ever been involved with has quickly devolved into more or less free babysitting for the worst kind of parents.

I wonder if a 'karma' system is possible by which students and tutors could give positive feedback to one another and students could 'unlock' highly rated tutors and visa versa. As someone who has spent a fair amount of time tutoring students (when I was a student myself, admittedly) I can certainly say that tutoring an unappreciative student will quickly sour the experience for a lot of folks, even if the majority are appreciative.

[btown]

This is an amazing model. Will definitely be brushing off the old math knowledge and signing up!

And hopefully we volunteers as a whole can make the platform feel like a partner that students can continuously rely on!

[alymurray]

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!