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Connecting faculty tutoring programs can be a huge benefit to the students and tutors, giving them more opportunities to find the resources they need to thrive. This is one of the reasons that two faculty associations at the University of Manitoba, the Engineering Society and the Science Students’ Association, connected with Nimbus. Now, both faculties are able to run their volunteer tutoring services independently, but students from each are easily able to see what is being offered across the board in one centralized platform.

These programs are also unique in the fact that they are run by volunteers. To understand the unique needs and challenges of these programs, Nimbus Learning sat down with Amy, Director of Academics with the Science Students’ Association, and Kassem, the Vice Stick Academic with the Engineering Society, to talk about staying efficient, juggling multiple roles, and how they motivate their peers.

How many volunteer hours do you dedicate to your tutoring programs a week?

Amy: The beginning of the semester is usually when I spend the most time on the program, just to review the tutors properly and to answer emails and stuff like that. That takes at least a couple of hours a week. Towards the end of the semester I only average an hour, maybe, a week.

Kassem: It’s the same for us. In the beginning of the semester, it was almost up to five hours a week, whereas now I’m barely making an hour per week.

What are the key objectives for your programs?

A: There are a lot of courses within the faculty of science that have a reputation for being difficult. A lot of the course material isn’t easy, so we recognize that there is a need for tutoring. Peer tutoring is great because students who have recently had success with the course can meet you at your level, right? There’s not that need to make a connection with someone who’s a lot older and is maybe more intimidating.

One of the objectives that is unique to this kind of programming, that other tutoring services might not be able to offer, is fostering relationships and building a sense of community within our faculty between people in different years.

K: The engineering program is also a very difficult field for a lot of students. We had a tutoring service before that wasn’t through Nimbus — it was just on our own type of thing. That was a lot less structured and we had some trouble with it. I agree with Amy on the fact that students want to be tutored by students that have taken the courses and who’ve been through the same pain with the same professors. It’s more relatable.

A: Oftentimes students will have the same teacher too, so the tutors know how the exams work and they can give that kind of personalized advice.

As student volunteers, the tutoring programs aren’t your only responsibility. How does Nimbus help you stay efficient?

K: Nimbus is super easy to use. Once you set someone up, they just free rein to do what they want in a controlled environment. When you sign up a tutor, it’s now their job to be available for the students. We don’t have to matchmake, which we used to do before we partnered with Nimbus. I think that’s how it makes it so much easier.

A: Also, the digitalization of the program is huge. Having an app format makes it so much more accessible for both students and for tutors. It’s a very familiar format for people and it’s available on both Samsung and Apple products. It’s just great.

From our administrative standpoint, it’s nice to have a list of all the tutors that use our platform, and then it’s also nice to see all the individual sessions. I can see who’s canceling sessions versus who’s re-booking sessions, so you can get an idea of who’s showing up to the sessions that they book.

As students yourselves, what are your relationships with the student tutors like?

K: Honestly, for tutors I met through Nimbus we now know each other on an acquaintance basis, and some of them actually became pretty good friends afterwards. It opened the door to a larger network.

How do you market to your student body?

A: Especially through COVID, we’ve moved almost all of our marketing online. So through social media, we have it on the Faculty of Science newsletter that goes out. We have monitors in the halls that are being put up, so we’ll have slides running through those continuously. Email services have been where we’ve had our biggest increase in users, but I think just word of mouth helps a lot.

We’ve done some in-person marketing — in the fall we had a lab event, which is just like a seminar with about a hundred or so students that are interested in pursuing research. We advertised it to the whole group, because these are people who are looking for academic, enriching opportunities, and we got some people who joined as tutors after that too.

K: We’re pretty similar. We’ve sent out a lot of emails and put notices in the weekly newsletters to the engineering department, both calling for tutors and advertising to tutees. On Instagram there’s weekly posts, stories and reels. And when Patrick came in, we did Nimbus pop-ins to lectures, which was really useful. A lot of people signed up from that.

At Nimbus, we’re not just rooting for you – we’re actively working to help your program succeed. If you have any questions or are looking for support for a tutoring program custom-designed to suit your campus, we want to help! Connect with us today to get started.

To find out more about integrating a new tutoring program with the existing student culture, we spoke to Cecil VanBuskirk, the former President of the St. FX Student’s Union and a current member of Nimbus’s Student Advisory Council which helps Nimbus understand the needs of current students.

Did St. FX have a tutoring program before you got in touch with Nimbus?

We did have a tutoring program, but it was based out of our library and never really caught on with the wider student body. A lot of people would tutor each other off of books, right in their little core demographic. They’d find their smart, cool friend that would tutor them just for free in the library or, like what I did in first year, I just found my fourth year buddy and paid him a couple of bucks just to help me out. It was all very informal. So to have a company come in and offer a solution that kind of modernized the tutoring overall made things a lot better for the state of the FX tutoring community.

We partnered with the library, that’s how we got the whole thing going. We said, okay, we want to help you out with this and make this successful and the librarian loved the fact that Nimbus offered a very modern approach: used technology, hands off for them, hands off for us too.

How are you approaching getting students interested in Nimbus when the formal tutoring program already wasn’t part of your campus culture?

Nimbus has, I think, added a lot of value to our campus, but students didn’t really flock to the program right away.

People don’t like change, right? We tried to employ more marketing, just try and promote the fact that this product could save everyone time if they just tried. Sure enough, it did actually take up.

**according to our analytics, St. FX increased their sessions from 36 in their first semester to 220 in the fall 2021 semester

Did you notice anything that really got people’s attention?

Overall, what worked is when the student representatives actually talked about Nimbus. What we did is we went to all the different classes around when midterms and exams were approaching. We figured if we targeted the first years, that would create some succession in the idea of Nimbus. So, we went to the big first year classes and asked them to go check out Nimbus, it takes two flippin seconds, and we got people to go try and download the app on their phone. That was great for just general uptake. Word of mouth, you could call it.

That’s where we kind of pivoted, we were like, Okay, this isn’t a big school. They actually need to see people talking about it or else they won’t pay attention.

The promotional materials that Nimbus supplied that we just kind of copied and pasted were unreal. We loved the convenience of it and the overall branding of it because it was so easy to fit into our own brand. We saw a lot of traction on certain Instagram posts that Nimbus created. They would get a lot of uptake and likes.

We also did one or two contests. But word of mouth was the big thing for us.

When you got Nimbus rolling, how did you find tutors?

We basically just pivoted the already existing legitimate business onto the Nimbus platform. Something that we struggled with was finding tutors that were willing to do it. There wasn’t as much of a need for it because everybody knows each other – everybody knows somebody that can help them.

Once we got the word of mouth out there, the more it was connecting the groups that didn’t know each other. So, if somebody needed help in a science course that they randomly took, that was the opportunity because they had no friends in that class. In the elective classes too, those were the opportunities which I thought were interesting because it’s a little bit different. People were looking for elective tutors on their hard courses.

The team at Mount Allison mentioned that one of the big things about the Nimbus program is that they could connect tutoring programs from different societies so they’re all on this one platform. So, if you were a business student and you had to take a science course to get an elective credit, but the business society didn’t have any science tutors on staff, then you could go to the science team and get a tutor through the app.

Yes, exactly. It’s like building bridges across different departments that you wouldn’t otherwise have access to. I think that that’s the beauty of Nimbus. And this whole new proposition of bridging the gap between schools to build this network that’s broader than just one campus.

Did Nimbus help with admin after the fact as well?

Yeah, the Nimbus guys were often the single point of contact between all of us. St. FX has a complicated structure but, basically, the library and the Student Union talked but we weren’t bonded, you know? We were often pulled in different directions and we would talk to Nimbus at different times. They would be kind of like our secretary – the people that would kind of hold everything together.

How was the process of transitioning through the pandemic?

I was ending my term just as the pandemic was beginning, but it was weird. It was certainly weird. And that’s where Nimbus became a big asset because it’s online.

To think about how many students are struggling right now, I can only imagine it is amplified when there’s no connection to anybody. Probably procrastination goes up, people don’t want to do it because they don’t have that connection to the work.

How can you connect with people online? Like, like, I feel like you and I are talking in person to a certain degree right now over Zoom, right? How can you encourage people to feel that way? everywhere?

The transition process was so much easier than I thought it was going to be with Nimbus, because they did so much of the legwork for us. I think that that’s a huge asset for anybody that’s considering Nimbus, simply because we’re all busy. We all don’t have time to achieve our goals because we have often spread ourselves way too thin. And to have a goal that’s very simple, which is improve the learning environment of St FX or a school and improve the tutoring environment and to have a platform that does all the legwork to set it up for us even as far as the negotiated contracts. That’s what was amazing to me is, I was anticipating having to write these tutoring contracts and I hated just thinking about it but, sure enough, Nimbus pulled through to do it all for us. I think that that was a huge relief on me that I could then focus on what really mattered, which was trying to get students and tutors to the platform.

The beauty of joining with Nimbus is that the transition process is easy. They’ll do a lot of strategic development and consulting with you to make sure that they succeed because they’re just as vested in the students’ learning experiences as we are

Keeping up with the demand for your tutoring program can be difficult – Nimbus can help. With our help, program administrators reduce their workload by 52%, which has allowed 60% of our partners to expand current or add new student success programs. Our dedicated team can help inform you (and your student interns) on where to focus your marketing efforts, and can even provide custom materials and strategies to ensure your program success.

Get in touch with us to learn how we can help!

The Alma Mater Society at the University of British Columbia had an incredibly successful first semester with Nimbus. They quadrupled the amount of tutoring sessions run, reduced their administrative workload, and began a group online tutoring feature which will be fully supported by Nimbus at the start of this year.

We spoke to Sheldon Birkett, the coordinator for AMS tutoring, about launching a completely virtual tutoring program and how they worked with Nimbus to tailor the app to exactly what they needed.

AMS has had a really successful year so far. How did you guys set yourselves up at the start of the semester to hit the ground running?

At the very beginning of September we held virtual imagine day, a day where students can go around to different booths and ask questions and see different clubs. We we mainly focused on Nimbus, and I think that really increased the initial interest in it.

This year we also had tutors pre-record announcements for class which I actually sent to all the major first year courses like the sciences and other big courses. We also sent the professors some materials the Nimbus business development team provided me about the app. I also made a course banner they could add to the syllabus, like a QR code on the syllabus they could scan and go to the app or find out how to access other services offered by AMS tutoring.

Nimbus helped a lot because they reached out to many AMS constituencies – the clubs and organizations at UBC, like the arts undergrad societies, the economics society, geography… Nimbus reaching out to them helped promote the service because there’s only two of us overseeing 30 to 40 tutors for both in group and private tutoring, so we don’t have that much time to devote to marketing.

What sort of supports did the Nimbus business development team provide?

Mainly it was any technical issues or anything that had to do with repayments, like refunds or anything like that. I would also ask [the Nimbus team] to also help out with marketing type stuff. What we really appreciated at the start of the year was self-promotion tips for tutors on the Nimbus app. That was a great idea because tutors can have much further reach than a coordinator can by just doing the promoting online.

We can only provide a certain number of courses because the AMS is funded through UBC AMS and we can only provide so much. Nimbus is a great solution because Nimbus brought on the engineering undergrad society; there’s a big demand for engineering courses that we can now offer.

Do you feel that Nimbus has helped you with the growth of the program?

Yes. I think that it made it more accessible. I’m on the app and its intuitive to use, especially during COVID it made the service a lot more accessible for students…I think that’s a major reason why a lot of students prefer using Nimbus rather than going through Zoom. Also, the appointment [feature] to book one on one; I think students really appreciate that.

Has Nimbus helped you guys reduce your administrative workload at all?

This saves a lot of time for me because we have, in addition to the constituencies, you also need tutoring for UBC varsity athletes. A large part of our tutors are appointment tutoring in previous years, and this year as well, because varsity athletes get subsidized tutoring…In terms of the payment structure, what we used to do at the end of every term, I would tally up all the training sessions and hours and everything and send it over to them, extended the payment, everything. On the Nimbus app, …[the athletes] they just pay on an as needed credit basis through the app, which is super helpful for myself as I don’t have to keep track of that. They have their own console on their end to deal with it.

Get in touch with us to learn more about how we can help!

This week, we sat down with Manjyot Kalkat, the Vice Stick Academic for University of Manitoba Engineering Society about running a faculty specific tutoring program and how he’s expanding the program while everyone is off campus.

Kalkat also talks about the discord server UMES is using to stay in touch and keep that school spirit going across the country.

What was your tutoring program like last year?

Before this we just had a registry that was posted on our website. If students wanted it, they would go to the registry, look for tutors under specific classes and then contact them from there.

What are your tutoring program goals for this year?

This season, we’re looking to increase our reach to the undergraduate engineering students. We hope to do this by increasing the tutoring programming through our partnership with Nimbus, adding more tutors so that students will have a number of choices from the different classes and making sure that students know that we have this set up.

How are you approaching this expansion?

After we got the {Nimbus] program set up and I got access to the admin console, my first step was to approach tutors from the previous years to see if they would be interested in joining our new program this year. Once everyone has been transitioned and were accustomed to the new platform, we pushed our promotions. We promoted to various social media accounts and sent an email blast to the undergraduate body. Doing that we were able to recruit more tutors and made sure that the students knew about the program there.

It has been effective. Through the weekly newsletters and emails there has been an increased number of applicants to the tutoring program.

What made you interested in working with Nimbus?

[Our exec team] really liked what they saw with Nimbus, mainly that everything was encapsulated in one platform. The big thing for me was having the online whiteboard feature, so during these trying times students will be able to teach each other online. Also having a payment feature right there as well, just having everything in one.

I’ve heard a lot of tutors enjoy the ability, when they’re setting up meetings, to use the messaging feature and then they can contact and find out what specific topics that the students would like to address. Then they can be better prepared for their first meeting.

What [the students] enjoy is how you can give feedback on tutors and read reviews that others have posted about them. They can better gauge if they will be a good fit for you.

I could imagine that the whiteboard feature would be pretty necessary with engineering.

It’s really good.

What other sorts of strategies have you put in place to cope with the pandemic?

One thing we have set up is this faculty wide Discord server. All the students can come on to chat and there’s different class channels on there. It’s another method for students to have discussions with one another and help each other out. They can just hop on the discord to chat and whatnot, it’s nice and relaxing as well to be in contact with everyone.

Students are always able to come and contact me with any academic needs. I can either help them or I can direct them to someone else who might be better suited to help

Do you have any advice for students this year?

I would say just ask for help, whenever you need it. There are plenty resources that UMES offers the Faculty of Engineering and is offered university wide by the University of Manitoba – like mental health resources and academic resources. So, making sure to get well informed with those. We make sure to do our job, promoting them as well.

Along with that I would also advise students to try to make connections in these times with other classmates and older classmates.