Tag: tutoring

Running a tutoring program is no easy task. There’s scheduling, interviews, background checks, helping with lessons, and so much more. But did you ever stop to think about the work that affects other departments? 

That’s one thing Derek Collins, Chair of Teaching and Learning at Lakeland College, noticed about their tutoring program before they decided to partner with Nimbus Learning. Not only did it take a ton of time for the person responsible with managing the program, but there was also support needed from their HR department and other members of the department.

Thankfully, Nimbus Learning provides an easy solution. We sat down with Derek to see how Lakeland used Nimbus Learning to cut back, big time, on the amount of time and effort it takes to run their tutoring program.

NL – How were you managing your peer tutoring program before Nimbus?

DC – We had a system that we used through our HR department to sign up tutors. Officially, they were done as individual contracts – you can imagine all the paperwork that involved.

Scheduling was managed through a spreadsheet. The person who looked after it just had a big sheet of paper and then would schedule tutors and match students with them. Eventually, we had to have a few more people on the team pick to up extra work because it was just too much.

Has Nimbus helped save your department time managing the Lakeland tutoring program?

Yeah, it was more than one person managing this program on top of what they were doing. It was quite a bit, and then you have to factor in the HR department doing all these contracts and then sending out checks once the hours were submitted.

Now we find maybe, at most, it takes one person a couple of hours a day – but that’s rare. Maybe at the start when there’s an influx of students and tutors.

I finished my duties in 20 minutes today.

Has the Nimbus platform helped your program be more efficient?

Oh, absolutely. Most of the students seem to be able to get onto the app no problem, whether they are a student or a tutor. Tutors take a little bit more work because we have to review their candidacy to be a tutor, so they’re waiting a little bit, but it’s still pretty good.

I like how the students can just connect with the tutor directly. That messaging is handled all within the system – we’re not sharing anything, so that privacy is maintained. That makes scheduling way easier.

There’s so many things I like about Nimbus. Being the chair of the department, I like being able to see the dashboard and track and see how it’s being used.

The funds are also managed through the app, which saves our HR department time too. The tutors have communicated they’re happy with how it’s deposited fairly quickly and easily. The way we do it is we front load: we give each student X amount of money. So that’s in the system already and most students aren’t paying anything; they can just book a tutor and are done.

What tips do you have for tutors using the Nimbus platform?

Making sure their availability is up to date. That’s probably the biggest one, remembering to make an updated schedule.

How do you intend to use the Nimbus platform to continue to grow your tutoring program?

There’s been a lot more demand for groups. I’ve noticed that some tutors are just spontaneously offering group sessions.

We have more of a demand for tutors than we have availability, so we end up with not enough tours generally. Encouraging more group sessions may be a way to facilitate more connections and support for students.

I’ve also taken a look at the mentorship platform. We could certainly see down the road expanding a mentorship program onto the platform.

About Nimbus Learning

Nimbus Learning works with the student success services at universities and colleges, to provide an end-to-end platform for easier access, more efficient management and receiving program insights for programs including tutoring, mentorship and study groups.

Organizations that have partnered with Nimbus Learning see on average 52% in time saved for administrators managing these programs and up to a two and half fold increase in student usage. 97% of students rate sessions booked and facilitated through the Nimbus platform 4.5 out of 5 stars or higher and report increases in grades.

The Nimbus platform can utilize anonymized data points such as current course grades, class attendance, demographics and more to develop a unique predictive score of academically at-risk students. This allows administrators to directly approach at-risk students instead of relying on them to seek help when it may be too late. This feature allows Nimbus to help schools better target at-risk students and significantly improve student retention.

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.

There’s nothing quite like a leader who came up through the ranks. Katarina Allan, President of the Mount Saint Vincent University Students Union (MSVUSU), knows first hand what it is like to be a tutor and having to spend a considerable amount of time connecting with students and setting up course work.

Allan first started her own company, Katarina Allan Tutoring, in 2016. Then, when the MSVUSU first started with Nimbus, Allan signed on. Overall, as a tutor, she says the platform made her more efficient. It got rid of the back and forth to book a session, and provided an easy way to advertise her services.

Now, as President of MSVUSU, Allan takes on a bird’s eye view of the tutoring program and Nimbus’ role within it. She sat down with Nimbus to talk about using the platform to improve tutoring in university and her advice for new peer tutors.

What was your first introduction to Nimbus Learning?

I’m actually a professional tutor. I run my own company in Halifax, Katarina Allan Tutoring. I’ve been tutoring professionally since 2016.

When the MSVUSU got the Nimbus tutoring platform in 2020, I thought it made a lot of sense to apply. I was approved, and I found the platform works really well. It increases the efficiency of connecting with students and takes away a lot of that extra time that goes into booking and rescheduling sessions and all that stuff.

** To avoid a conflict of interest when administering the Nimbus program on the MSVU campus, Katerina no longer operates as a tutor on the Nimbus platform.

Do you feel the Nimbus platform made it easier to connect with students?

It’s easy to connect with students because they can find you in the app and send you a message. Tutors also make their times available right on the app. It takes away a lot of the back and forth, emailing questions about pricing, availability, or what courses you teach. Nimbus just sort of deals with all of that and streamlines it. It’s much easier that way.

It also makes payment processing way simpler. When I’m working with students off the Nimbus platform, I’m generating invoices and sales receipts and working through all of that. So there’s a bit of paperwork on either end. Sometimes, there’s situations where you have to go and ask someone to pay you or remind them because they’ve forgotten. With the Nimbus platform, that’s all taken care of ahead of the session — you don’t have to have those awkward conversations.

Has Nimbus made your program more efficient?

It’s much more efficient through the platform than it is to connect with them through other means. And I think it’s also more efficient for the student because, when they look for the course, they can select from the tutors available. They don’t have to spend time on Kijiji or in a Facebook group, trying to track down tutors. They also don’t have to purchase their tutoring service from a larger company where the tutoring rates tend to be a bit higher, and the amount that actually goes to your tutor is lower.

What do you find are the most useful features of the Nimbus platform?

The tutor profile, the in app messaging, and the scheduling and payment processing are the most useful ones. The tutor profile is really useful because it saves time on questions like, Are you able to tutor this class? If I was available, I could turn it on and then the answer is evident through the app. And if I tutored a class, the class is available and that’s evident through the app.

The tutor profile is also more efficient for the student because they can get a pretty good picture of what the qualifications the tutor has and what their price point is going to be.

One thing that I also find works really well is providing feedback to the Nimbus team, and having new features in the app developed.

How do you intend to use the Nimbus platform to continue to grow your tutoring program?

For the university and for our students, I’m really looking forward to increasing the visibility of the Nimbus tutoring platform on campus and increasing our course coverage. I’m continuing to onboard more tutors so we have that support available.

What tips do you have for tutors using the Nimbus platform?

Create a really thoughtful tutor profile and apply to teach as many courses as possible, because you can always turn them off if you’re getting busy. You’re more likely to get a student if you have more course coverage and more availability. Even if you couldn’t spend a full 10 hours tutoring in a week, if you have 10 hours available, put them on your profile. Then, once you have however many hours filled, you can adjust your schedule.

What tips do you have for tutors in general?

Tutors need to be able to say when they don’t know something — it’s really important. It doesn’t mean that you’re not doing a good job as a tutor. Honesty is pretty key there.

You also need to listen to your student and to what their different learning needs are. Being able to explain the same concept in five different ways back-to-back is a skill that you’re going to want to have because you’ll get to know your student, and you’ll get a more efficient view of what types of explanation will work with that student. By just repeating the same explanation you heard in class, it is not going to work.

You’re there to help them work with their situation. Everyone is capable, they may just need different learning strategies, techniques, and different amounts of time. In the lessons, sometimes people struggle, and it’s definitely helpful when a tutor can say something as simple as you know what, I see a lot of people with this issue. It’s not just you. Then there’s a sense of relief and you can move forward in a problem solving way. A lot of tutoring can be managing student anxiety. You never want to pretend you’re a counselor, because you’re not, but you can help bring that anxiety level down and help them learn better.

Finally, take notes for yourself so you remember, when you go to tutor that same student again, what worked last time. Start with what worked, and each session will get more and more efficient.

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 while recruiting more tutors (help drafting email campaigns, marketing materials, et cetera) we want to help! Connect with us today to learn more.

Learn more

In this article:

  • A global survey of 2,000 knowledge workers found 68 per cent of workers toggle between apps up to 10 times in an hour
  • 31 per cent of workers say this constant switching of apps can cause them to lose concentration.
  • A look at how Nimbus centralizes everything you need to run your tutoring or mentorship programs
  • Thanks to the time saved with the Nimbus platform, 60% of our partners were able to expand current or launch new success services since partnering with Nimbus

Apps are great. From data collection to managing the schedules of many different people at once, apps consistently promise to make our lives easier – and for most of our needs, they do just that. However, each app that solves a problem adds to the litany of programs that we must keep track of and integrate into our work ecosphere. Information produced by each app also needs to be integrated with the information produced by other programs which can be a time consuming process.

Surveys have shown that the constant switching between apps costs us valuable time and risks knocking us off track. Instead, institutions looking for ways to increase productivity should consider centralizing apps and programs onto one platform.

Data show the constant switching between apps costs valuable time

A global survey of 2,000 knowledge workers found 68 per cent of workers toggle between apps up to 10 times in an hour, with 31 per cent admitting this constant switching of apps can cause them to lose concentration.

This constant switching between apps and other programs is also annoying, with 52 per cent of respondents saying they found it more annoying than paying bills.

But all is not lost. A majority of respondents (67 per cent) said bringing most of their apps onto one platform would help them develop a better workflow, with 65 per cent also saying it would help them become more productive.

Read more at “App Overload is Creating Chaos at Work and Costing Businesses Billions” by Ring Central.

Nimbus centralizes recruitment, scheduling, program tracking & analytics and reporting

The Nimbus Learning platform offers a seamless experience for administrators, with everything needed to run your tutoring or mentorship program in one spot.

The Nimbus platform carries the following features:

  • Recruitment: Tutor Vetting and Interviewing
  • Scheduling: Making schedules around tutors class and work schedules
  • Program Tracking: Timesheets, Hour tracking
  • Program Analytics
  • Surveying and reporting

The Nimbus team also follows a software as a service model, where we continue to work with and support our partners even after the Nimbus platform is up and running at their institution. Depending on the institutions needs, Nimbus offers tutor management support, including recruitment, interviewing, vetting and training.

We also offer marketing support and customized branding, to ensure your program hits the ground running.

The results of centralizing your program with Nimbus

Our results speak for themselves – interviews with our partners show the Nimbus Platform allows them to:

  • Improve data collection processes so staff have access to more data, while spending less time collecting it.
  • Reduced the day-to-day administrative process, and reduced staff workload by 53%
  • With this time saved 60% of our partners were able to expand current or launch new success services since partnering with Nimbus (ex. Mentorship programs, group facilitated study etc.)

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

In this article:

  • Many of the post secondary directors and managers of student success services we speak to say that hours of pre-purchased tutoring blocks go unused, leading to a concern about wasting funds and under-utilized services.
  • Developing a peer tutoring program can address both of these issues, as research demonstrates that students prefer course-specific tutoring rather than subject-specific tutors. In that case, who better to teach from a student-centric perspective than a student who has already excelled at the course?

Often, we hear from post-secondary institutions that a considerable amount of the hours they pay for up-front with external tutoring companies go unused. These are funds that can be put towards valuable programming or to developing a tutoring program that directly caters to the needs of your campus.

With that, we thought we’d take a look at how bringing your tutoring program in-house can help improve student usage and reach more people.

Students want class-specific tutors

not general subject tutors

Tutoring Program Benchmarks, conducted by the Primary Research Group in 2020, found that students in 4-year research colleges want class-specific tutoring instead of walk-in programs. (Primary Research Group, 2020).

We’ve said it once and we’ll say it again: No one understands the trials and tribulations of a difficult course on your campus like a student who has just persevered through it.

Students who have excelled in the courses they are tutoring have unique insight into their own personal experiences with the homework/assignments/tests, knowledge gaps that exist between courses that need to be addressed, and may also know about other resources (for example, study guide on course homepages) that can support student success.

Develop an increased ability to cater to student needs

With the knowledge that students want course-specific tutors, the next step is to determine exactly what courses are in high demand. Meeting students where they are at is a key factor in increasing how programs are used.

With the need for analytics, it is then important to note that approximately half of the medium-sized schools surveyed by Primary Research Group (2020) (medium sized school = 3500-11,000 students) expressed they had less data than they needed to get a clear picture of their program.

Bringing a tutoring program in-house allows directors and managers of student success services to collect the necessary analytics and devise a strategy for the future. Program analytics, like those provided by the Nimbus Learning platform, allow administrators to see exactly what courses are in demand, and then recruit student tutors for those classes.

There is no replacement for a home-grown tutoring program that caters directly to the changing needs of the students body.

Taking a tutoring program in-house may seem like a massive undertaking, but with the right support can lead to a personalized program that doesn’t put excessive burden on the administration staff. Nimbus Learning provides flexible service packages, from simple platform access all the way to tutor recruitment, hiring and training, marketing support, and tech services.

Primary Research Groups (2020). The College Tutoring Program Benchmarks, 2020 Edition.

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!

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!