Tag: Student Union

The Talented Scholars Resource Room (TSR^2) at MIT provides academic support and guidance to students through the Office of Minority Education. Academic support services — such as exam reviews, facilitated study groups and one-on-one tutoring — are provided to students free of charge and are led by advanced undergraduate and graduate students.

In line with the world-class reputation of MIT, TSR^2 offers top-notch services at an incredibly efficient pace, optimizing a small team to meet the needs of their student body. For the 2021 school year (July 2021-June 2022), the small team of facilitators (tutors) hosted 330 sessions, exemplifying consistency and productivity in support of their students.

Because of their large impact, the TSR^2 team needed a responsive program that could take over the time-consuming and repetitive tasks, while being easy for students to adapt to and use during stressful periods of their academic calendar.

The Nimbus Learning Solution

A 50% reduction in administrative labour

“Before Nimbus, everything was on us. The actual platform for students to request their tutoring times had to be maintained by us. That was the same platform for the facilitators to put their times and the availability. So we had to add everything, remove everything, we had to take care of any changes that we needed to make.”

— Somiya Kalloo, Assistant Dean for Academic Excellence programs, MIT Office of Minority Education

The Nimbus platform takes over scheduling and data collection for both students and tutors, meaning administration has more time to focus on connecting with students and responding to their needs. By switching to the Nimbus platform, the TSR^2 estimates they saved 10 hours per week. Uri Martinez-Tavera, Program Coordinator for MIT Office of Minority Education, says she now only spends 10-15 hours per week on orchestrating the program, meaning they have seen a 50% reduction in administrative time.

Reliability is also a factor for any technology-based program. The team estimates they are saving even more than the 10-hours-per-week, considering their previous platform would sometimes glitch and the team would have to manually schedule all sessions until a fix was made. With Nimbus Learning, this is no longer a concern.

On top of the administrative workload, Nimbus also added new methods of data collection the team was able to use to plan ahead. Information, like which courses are in high demand, help them make facilitator recruitment responsive to the changing needs of the student body. This makes it easier for students to get the help they need when they need it — and happy students continue to come back.

Making the student experience easier

“It has been a consistent upward trajectory, which has been awesome.”

— Somiya Kalloo, Assistant Dean for Academic Excellence programs, MIT Office of Minority Education

Being able to advertise an easy-to-use booking system has made it easier for students to take advantage of the services offered by TSR^2. After a brief transition period lasting approximately one month, the number of sessions have begun to climb over the course offerings from the year before.

Kalloo says this is due in part to how easy it is for students to use the Nimbus platform, as well as training videos and FAQ provided on their website that can help students on demand. Facilitators trained in all aspects of the platform by Nimbus also means that if students have a question, they have multiple resources they can go to for answers.

Improving access wherever possible is important, as each barrier increases likelihood of student drop off. An easy-to-use system helps ensure programs are used to their potential.

A solid program structure

The TSR^2 program runs a tight ship, which means students know what support they can expect both in terms of working as a facilitator and when seeking out help.

One staff member is specifically dedicated to getting academic material and course outlines from the different departments. All of this information – upcoming midterms, assignments, material to help with these tasks, et cetera, is then consolidated and provided to the tutors. Facilitators also have training sessions on both the platform and on educational skills, as well as monthly check-ins with the administrative team.

Recognizing the many types of learning styles students may have, TSR^2 also offers flexibility — from one-on-one to group study sessions to problem nights, offered remotely and in-person. The program meets the students where their needs are.

Supported by a responsive partnership team

“It has always been a ‘Yes, we can do it,’ or, ‘Let’s work on it.’ It’s never been a ‘no, that’s not something we can do,’ which has been really awesome.”

— Somiya Kalloo, Assistant Dean for Academic Excellence programs, MIT Office of Minority Education

As with all programs, TSR^2 has specific needs that cater directly to their program and students. The Nimbus team is always an email away, ready to adapt to the demands of a growing program.

At first, the program allowed students to sign up on an as-needed basis, but the TSR^2 became concerned that a few eager students were quickly booking up all the sessions. Nimbus introduced a cap for each student, to ensure support is available for all students when they are ready for it. This cap can be adapted as needed, so the team can adapt for special circumstances.

Conclusion

Small teams can have a large impact on the lives of students — especially when one has been set up as effectively as TSR^2. Nimbus plays an important support role in this program, cutting down on their administrative workload by an estimated 10 hours per week, while also keeping the team informed through up-to-date analytics. This means the TSR^2 team has more time to focus on what really matters — and the information they need to do it better than ever before.

“A wonderful aspect of working with Nimbus Learning is they have been so open and welcoming. Both the facilitators and TSR^2 team have the option to just reach out for help, and the Nimbus team has been super responsive.”

— Somiya Kalloo, Assistant Dean for Academic Excellence programs, MIT Office of Minority Education

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.

At Nimbus, we’re always thrilled to start a new partnership – to connect with their new teams and support their unique campus culture. With that, we are beyond excited to announce a new partnership with the Mount Allison Student Union in New Brunswick.

We sat down with Charlie Burke, the Vice President of Academic Affairs at the Mount Allison Student Union, to talk about the union’s ambitious plans for centralizing the various campus tutoring programs using the Nimbus platform and how they intend to meet the demands of a hybrid campus.

What drew you to partner with Nimbus?

Previously the Student Union hasn’t been involved with peer tutoring. Last year, our president became really interested in Nimbus and seeing how we could help play more of a role in connecting students with tutoring. I got involved to bring Nimbus to campus and figure out a way that the student union can promote and centralize the tutors across societies.

My main goal is when students think “I need a tutor,” they can just go straight to the Nimbus app, instead of having to go searching through the different student societies to find a tutor in the subject they need.

Our previous format also really wasn’t efficient because once the students found a tutor, they would email them only to find out they weren’t available, or they were on exchange or something.

So my main goal this year is to just centralize and make today more efficient.

Will you manage the tutors, or will it still be under the discretion of the societies on campus?

We’re stepping away from the onboarding of tutors so the societies can still put their tutors on this app. The societies know what kinds of tutors they need and we don’t want to interfere with that.

We’re partnering with our accommodation centre. They have a pretty strict set of rules that their tutors need to have to be qualified. We don’t want to step on their toes because they’ve got a system that works really great over there; we just want to make sure that it’s more accessible and efficient for students.

The big thing that we like with Nimbus is that we can now send out surveys and see tutor ratings and see where complaints are. We’re excited to use these tools to pinpoint where tutoring needs to be more efficient and where organizations can do better. We’re looking to get a better experience for people to use this year.

Have you changed your approach to the tutoring program at all this year due to COVID?

Because of COVID things are just different because they need to be quite virtual now, or have the option of being virtual. Partnering with Nimbus gave us that option to have virtual tutoring sessions and tools like the whiteboard to run them.

This fall Mount Allison is doing this 50/50 hybrid of in person classes and online classes. So we wanted to make sure that students who were learning remotely weren’t completely left out of peer tutoring, because they couldn’t FaceTime a tutor or something.

It’s also a good safeguard, just in case any outbreaks or anything happens that sets back restrictions. We have Nimbus as a safety net because it has that virtual option.

So you guys are primed to go almost completely virtual if you need to.

Yeah, exactly. That was one of the biggest reasons why we went ahead with Nimbus this year and got so much University support. So many of the different organizations across the university really wanted to come in on this with us because it gives that safety net where if things need to move online, we can quickly transition.

Do you have any advice for tutors who are going to be navigating online teaching?

My advice is to be patient – I think that’s my advice generally this year. Even with students when talking about faculty – it’s different. It’s really different. And it’s not gonna go as smoothly as things could be just because we’re in this crazy world right now and we don’t really know what’s going to happen.

Take things slow. Learn the tools and try out different methods of tutoring and you will get that same success at the end of the day.

This is that new normal that everyone’s talking about, right?

Yeah, exactly. It’s gonna be different and so many people can’t wait for things to go back to how they were. They might go back to normal, or you might be on Zoom for quite a while.

Try to embrace the new things that are coming out of this; utilize all the opportunities and cool things online and remote tools that are coming out. Just because something’s online doesn’t mean it’s automatically less valuable. It could end up being something super useful, that you end up using on a daily basis.

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 more about how we can help!

This week we have a special guest blog post from Patrick Arevalo, the Peer Tutoring Coordinator for the University of Manitoba’s Student Union. Patrick was responsible for launching the campus-wide tutoring service for UMSU and not only set up the program and hired the tutors, but also marketed it to the student body.

Patrick found that the most effective advertisement strategy for the tutoring program was sending email blasts to the student listserv during midterm and final exam season, rather than relying on posters, TV spots, or social media advertisements.

Patrick also used Nimbus’s booking and payment system to hit the ground running, and made a few tweaks to the system to allow a more personalized, hands-on management style.

I held the position as UMSU’s Peer Tutoring Coordinator from October 2018 until May 2020. Before I took on this role, the University of Manitoba did not have any tutoring services that offered campus-wide courses; certain faculties only ran volunteer-based peer tutoring for courses in that same faculty. The UMSU Peer Tutoring Program, therefore, was envisioned to be a campus-wide, course-specific tutoring service that allows peer tutors to be incentivized for providing top-quality tutoring while remaining relatively affordable for students that benefit from the program.

Establishing a system that meets these requirements was not going to be an easy task in the administrative level. With Nimbus’ help, we had a head start in how the payment and booking system works – students can search up the course they need help on in the app, and if they see a tutor they want to book, they can do it themselves. This process relieved much of the stress I would have when it comes to peer tutor and student pairing, allowing myself to focus on other administrative tasks.

However, a few things still needed tweaking in order for Nimbus to fit UMSU’s needs. One particular feature is the tutor application process. The app originally allows tutors to apply directly to the program using the app, but I asked this to be removed so that tutors can apply by e-mailing me directly. This is because I wanted to have a more hands-on approach when it came to tutor application and interviews just so that I get to meet them in person, as well as vet them in the standard that I expect them to uphold when they become approved tutors in the program. This also allows them an opportunity to clear up any questions they may have about the Peer Tutoring Program.

When the program launched in Winter 2019, the next biggest hurdle we faced was trying to promote this service to a campus of 25,000 students in different buildings and campuses. Posters, social media advertisements, and campus TV advertisements only resulted to limited awareness. The most effective advertisement strategy that we found was utilizing the student union’s e-mail blasts to students as long as we properly time it around midterm and finals season. The first month of launch also revolved largely around bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements when using the app, but we started to see the potential of the program under the Nimbus App.

The second year of my term focused on program awareness and building user trust, and with the help of the VP Student Life and my Services Manager at the time, we saw significant improvements from the first year in terms of awareness, usage and trust. Working as the Peer Tutoring Coordinator ultimately made me see the importance of a tutoring service that not only exists as a service that students can use, but also one that strives to integrate itself in the campus community as something that students can repeatedly rely on throughout their undergraduate career, and perhaps one day give back to by becoming a tutor.

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!

Nimbus began working with the St. FX Student Union in the Fall of 2019 to assist in streamlining their tutoring platform. Representatives of the Student Union say the system has made it much easier for the tutors to connect with their clients. Rather than having to track the various communication methods and messaging systems that clutter up modern life, both tutors and students knew exactly how to get in contact with each other through the app. The platform also allows the administrators of the program to set up specific sites approved for tutoring – increasing the safety for both students and tutors. Finally, since they are now able to track what subjects students are requesting, the tutoring program knows which subjects they need to recruit tutors for, better supporting their students. 

Here, we spoke to a representative of the student union to see how Nimbus is fitting into their tutoring program.

When did the St. FX Student Union start using Nimbus?

We implemented the system in November.

What made you look for a platform like Nimbus?

We were struggling a lot with our past system for peer tutoring and a lot of tutors sounded very frustrated to us. It wasn’t really accurate. And so, when Nimbus came to us suggesting them as a peer tutoring app, we began to look into other options and ended up going with Nimbus because we thought they were the best option.

What sorts of barriers were you experiencing with your tutoring program before implementing Nimbus?

I couldn’t speak to all of the barriers, but from what I’ve understood from listening to students, the main barrier was the technology and getting in contact with their own tutor. Rather than the apps facilitating all of it, which it does now, they would have to ask and email each other and a lot of other barriers to entry. The vetting system was complicated, and the software in general was pretty dated. 

What were you looking for in this sort of app?

[When] we started looking, we began to realize that what we were looking for is an app that facilitated everything: messaging, calendar invites, the whole ten yards.

Like a one stop shop – so students don’t have to navigate away from the app in order to get this sorted out?

Exactly. A lot of tutors, what I found, were using their Facebook messaging for some students, emails for other students. They would have trouble remembering where they were meeting up. 

How did Nimbus help your tutoring program?

We’re still in the midst of really making it go, but so far the safety of [the program] because all of it’s in house and we get to pick the locations that tutors tutor at. The fact that we’re able to now monitor how many happen, where we need more tutors, or what subjects we need more tutors for and things – that’s really excellent. It organized it, to give you a short answer.

So, it helped you not just with scheduling but also to kind of streamline the entire program?

Yeah, absolutely.

Is there anything else that you’d like us to know about Nimbus or how you’re implementing it?

Everybody that I’ve worked with in Nimbus and in the implementation process have been incredible to work with. And the speed at which Ben and Will work at, also, how they’ve helped us in our marketing troubles and creating marketing materials and creating classroom announcements scripts has been superb. From a customer service perspective, they’ve been absolutely great to work with.Reduce guesswork — rely on data and disciplined rules, not emotions learn more.

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