The situation
TSR² provides academic support to MIT students through the Office of Minority Education. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students lead the sessions, and the service is free. From July 2021 to June 2022, a small team of facilitators hosted 330 sessions.
The team maintained its own booking platform for students and facilitators. Every change was theirs to make, and when that platform failed, they scheduled sessions by hand.
“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.”
What Nimbus did
- Took over scheduling and data collection for students and facilitators.
- Trained facilitators on every part of the platform, so students had more than one place to get answers.
- Showed which courses were in demand, so the team could recruit facilitators ahead of need.
- Added a booking cap per student when a few students were booking up every session.
The result
The team estimates it saves 10 hours a week. Uri Martinez-Tavera, who coordinates the program, now spends 10 to 15 hours a week running it, about half the time it took before. After a transition of roughly a month, sessions began to climb over the year before.
“It has been a consistent upward trajectory, which has been awesome.”
In their words
“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.”