A Case Study in How to Not Do Online Tutoring

   They are a rip-off.

     The students have to buy packages of credits that eventually expire if unused after a certain amount of time, at a rate of about $73-$95/hr. The tutors get $15/hr of this.  That means they are taking over 80% in fees from what they collect from the student.  This is Information Superhighway robbery!  Even if the tutors were paid more, I have heard that clients have a hard time getting refunds for unused hours.  Although, it seems that a complaint to the Better Business Bureau helps get you some attention.  They also seem responsive on ConsumerAffairs.com.

     How much is an hour of massage (or any other service where you have 100% of a professional's attention) worth to you?  In this case, you generally get what you pay for.  From what I heard from most of my students, helpful and informative tutors are a rare thing on Varsity.

    The software is broken.

     After logging into the website, the \"Home" page would just be blank sometimes.  It is meant to show upcoming sessions, but it fails to populate often, giving the false impression that no sessions are scheduled for that day.  I just skip this page entirely and go straight to the schedule by default. This \"Home" page could be removed from the site completely without any loss of functionality or content.  The only information on there is duplicated elsewhere or is otherwise meaningless.  It's not a good sign that the default landing page is a worthless, redundant, and confusing piece of garbage.

     The tutor ratings are fake.  Mine as been at 4.9 the whole time, regardless of the ratings I actually receive.  I started out at 4.9 (before I even tutored anyone).  After a few sessions with perfect ratings, it went up to 5.0, then went back down to 4.9 shortly after without any low reviews to bring it down.  It has stayed there ever since, despite getting some low ratings from Canadian Statistics students specifically.  (Side note:  I have no clue what is going on with Statistics education in Canada.  They do it differently up there?  Why?  I have taught Statistics for years, and I cannot help Canadian Statistics students at all.  If I ever figure out why, I will post an update.)  Even after getting a long string of 5 star reviews from a few students that religiously reviewed me after every session 2 or 3 times a week, my average rating simply never changed, not once.  I never saw it dip down to 4.8, and when it was a 5.0 for a few days, it had no obvious reason to drop back down again.

     The scheduling system totally sucks. There's no way to indicate when you are unavailable, so students think you are always available, and can therefore schedule sessions at the last minute on days that you are not available.  This is just lunacy. Tutors can list their availability on your profile but this has NO BEARING WHATSOEVER on the scheduling system.  Who thought this up?  It makes me wonder if AI *designed* the site, instead of just running it.  I mean, what kind of scheduling system does NOT allow you to mark when you are unavailable?

     The \"List of Students" page is useless.  It combines parents' and students' info in a way that is hard to tell who is who.  And you usually only get the contact info for the parents, which is useless when you are trying to make last-minute scheduling adjustments or to remind the student that they are late for a session.  It is not sorted alphabetically, and there is no way to hide students that are inactive.  The result is an ever-growing unsorted list of names that you have to manually search through every time when selecting a student for any reason.  I mean, even if it was just alphabetized, that would help a lot.  Rather, it is just a heap of user data that is not easy to parse or sort through.

     The Messages page is really messed up.  There is no way to sort messages, and you cannot delete messages, even after a student asks to be unpaired from you.  Their message sits in your inbox forever, with no way to move it or delete it.  You can only send messages to students that have already sent you one.  If a student has not sent you a message through the system yet, they do not show up in your list of contacts.  So, it only works for replies, you cannot initiate a message using the message system.  This is totally broken.  Most students resort to SMS (i.e. \"texting"), which is easier to manage anyway.

     Invoicing is simply broken.  You can make an invoice out of thin air.  It doesn't have to be attached to a session or anything that actually happened.  That should not be the case.   I'm hoping there is an auditing system in place to catch billing errors, but I had a few accidentally mis-billed sessions go through without raising any red flags.

     The whiteboard is pure crap.  It is unintuitive, yet appears to have been designed for elementary-aged kids (there's a big button for stickers, yay!).  Pretty much every other whiteboard I've ever used is better than this one, in almost every way.  I will say this though:  per-user undo.  Brilliant!  That is one feature that VarsityTutors got right on their whiteboard.  Other than that, it is really frustrating to use for most students and seems to require a lot of bandwidth.  When the connection gets spotty on either end, the audio cuts out and different whiteboards are shown to each user.  There certainly are some fatal flaws, that much is certain.

     Classes

     VarsityTutors are actively undermining what it means to be a teacher, and the pay rate that teachers can expect.  All in the name of the almighty \"pandemic" that never was.  They are offloading actual \"classes" onto their $15/hr. tutors.  Duties include lesson plans and grading and attendance and all the things that tutors should NOT have to worry about.  All for $20/hr.  I'm sorry, that's sick.  If you want stupid cohorts of students, hire cheap unqualified teachers, and the real talent will find somewhere else to make a living.  Prove me wrong.

     VarsityTutors still exploits the pandemic that is officially over (despite ongoing efforts to bring it back at many colleges and other federally-funded institutions).  Some of the class descriptions begin with \"During this time of pandemic.... \".  Most likely the description just has not been updated since this was a concern, but it makes you wonder how often they update their own text.

  The server

    The server fails to respond often.  Sometimes, there is no audio for one of the participants.  Other times, you cannot see what they are writing.  There are often login delays that can last up to 10 minutes.  The server gets overloaded during Finals Week because everyone is logging in at once.  Seriously, the server seems to be running on a constantly-overheating laptop in Hillary Clinton's broom closet.  They should upgrade to some real servers if they want to run a real business. We all know they can afford to with their 80+% fee rate.  'Nuff said.

   Automated emails are insulting.

Most of the emails sent out are idiotic in nature and are somewhat insulting.  There are generally three types of emails that they send out automatically for nearly all events.

• \"This student has decided to not move forward." This is the default email sent out even when the semester ends and the student graduates.  I call that moving forward.  They also send this one out any time the student's payment fails, which should be private information the tutor does not have access to.  It is insulting to both parties.
• \"Urgent Matter. Action required: possible missed session with xxxxxx." They send out this one any time the tutor fails to log into a session, even if it is THEIR servers that are causing the log in problem.  Understandable, but still insulting.
• \"We notice you haven't met with xxxxx in over a week, please tell us why." Some students don't need help every 7 days like clockwork.  They even send this one out en masse during Spring Break.  They only give you three choices to select from:  a) We have a meeting scheduled for the next 7 days,  b) We have met but I have not logged the session, or c) We have no sessions planned.   There are obviously other possibilities.  What if you have a session planned for 8 days from now?  There is no option for that one.  It is condescending, just like all their other email templates.

   Student/Tutor pairing is random.

     There is no way to tell when you are getting a qualified tutor, or a serious student.  As a parent or learner, this can be even more frustrating.  As was pointed out in another blog, VarsityTutors acts as a tutoring service, providing you with a tutor that they think is a match for whatever reason.  On the other hand, Wyzant is a tutoring market, allowing the learner to shop around for qualified tutors, and also allowing the tutors to be more selective with the jobs they apply for.  It is really just a better way to approach the problem of pairing learners with tutors that match their needs and learning styles.

   Default sessions are too long.

   The shortest session by default is 90 minutes, which is longer than most college classes.  Some accounts can book shorter 60 minute sessions, but sometimes students just need 15-30 minutes for a test review or to get help on a single homework problem.  It would be nice to have that option.  However, VarsityTutors forces longer sessions by default.

   Resigning was a nightmare

    Eventually, I got fed up with the inefficiencies and decided to resign from tutoring through VarsityTutors entirely.  This was a frustrating process, to say the least.  There was no obvious way to resign.  I just wound up sending a resignation letter to the contact form address.  After some back and forth, I finally entered the 15/30 day period where I was still obligated to uphold any scheduled sessions while they found new tutors for my clients.  The wording in the email was vague, to say the least.  They required 15 days of commitment, but also mentioned that the contract would still be valid  for 30 days.  It was never clear which time frame was the right one to follow.  While all this was going on, one of my more aggressively abusive students kept asking for \"classes", as she puts it.  I was not able to reply to her messages after the 15-day mark.  Not only was she able to keep sending me messages that I was unable to reply to, she was able to schedule sessions on my calendar that I was unable to join. To complicate things, my regular contract renewal date occurred during the 30-day window, so there were a few sessions that I had held but was not able to invoice for.  As a result, I had to renew my contract for the last 10 days of my resignation window to get the last payments I was owed.  I have never worked for a more frustrating system in my life.  I hope that was the last time I am ever treated like that.

Pros:

• High Traffic, easy to fill up your schedule as a tutor.
• Per-user undo in the whiteboard, where each user can only undo the changes that they themselves have made.
• Some parents and students seemed to genuinely like it.
• Other (paid?) bloggers seem to like it.

Cons:

... too many to list.  see above.

Pros:

     Hard to list them all, because they do almost everything right.

Cons:

• The whiteboard does not let me write \"periods" or \"dots" sometimes, which may be dependent on my hardware.  Getting a better drawing tablet might fix the problem.
• There are not separate \"undo's" for each participant, so that we undo each other's work by accident.

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