[ghufran_syed]

If you are already keeping the chat logs, maybe you could figure out a way to record the whole session including the whiteboard sessions? Then if you can figure out a way to tag the session’s content appropriately, you would pretty quickly end up with a searchable library of tutoring sessions available on the site (wouldn’t be hard to anonymize them to protect the student and tutor’s privacy). Then you could use the students and volunteers to filter them for quality by making them available in the app / on the site by upvoting etc. That way you would leverage your expensive resource (volunteers) and provide another way for students to benefit if they aren’t in a position to do an interactive tutoring session e.g. on the bus, too noisy at home etc - many low income students have no quiet place at home to do this kind of session because there are just too many people sharing the space.

Getting back to the safety aspect - people are less likely to test the boundaries of your safety rules if they know these (anonymized) sessions will be seen by many other people, and this would massively increase the number of eyeballs for each session further increasing the detection rate of any remaining bad behavior

[Edit - you could also use these recorded sessions to help volunteers get better at teaching, you could get an expert to put together small videos on improving teaching technique with positive and negative anonymized examples from the sessions, then make them available to the volunteer tutors. That could be another low cost and scalable way to reward the tutors - most people who teach would like to get better at it!]

[alymurray]

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!