I agree with all of you! I think 3 free sessions is fair for the student to test out the system and also to see who they feel comfortable with. If they can do more than that, yes, I think unfortunately you would have some people taking advantage of the system.I honestly don’t mind doing a full hour for free, however, I do think the student can feel in a half hour if they have a good rapport with the tutor. Either way is cool. I definately think this thread is a fabulous meeting of the minds! Good job, Jon! as usual :-)

I definitely feel that the first lesson needs to be an opportunity for both the student and the teacher to be able to assess the learning situation. The student needs to know if she feels comfortable with the tutor. Sometimes an absolutely brilliant tutor may have a different teaching style than she would like. So, of course a bit of tutor shopping is needed. Three does seem appropriate.

I like the idea of 30 minutes as the free trial lesson. I can assess and diagnose the learner’s needs, break the ice, and get to know the prospective student in that period, and she can certainly decide if I am a “good fit.”

I also feel it is critical to permit free lessons from teachers who are available and to be able to book in advance.

Just to really throw a wrench in the works, I have always felt it important to reward dedication and loyalty, and I would love to be able to offer a free lesson to anyone who sticks with me for ten lessons. They deserve this benefit, and it would definitely encourage sticking with the same tutor for an extended period. I would have a better feeling that my students will try to stay with me in the long run. I have also been encouraged by savvy business owners to offer a “multiple payment in advance” discount. Say, if they purchase five at once, they get 15% off the price. Then, I know right away to plan five lessons for this individual.

Another crazy idea is to keep the ten free minutes, and offer a half price option for the first lesson. Then, they get 30 minutes free anyway, and I still get paid something.

That way, the ten minutes is getting to know each other, then the lesson can be the nuts and bolts of the diagnostic portion, and we can really get down to business…

Then there’s the edufire discount idea. If we are working on edufire, and we decide to take lessons, couldn’t we have an employee discount? I am planning to take lessons on this website from a tutor, and I am planning to give lessons to an edufire tutor. I hate to take full price from my student when I know how hard she is working for the site…

brilliant ideas sandy, i agree with you

I know I am not a tutor, but what if the tutor could choose the length of the FREE sessions they offer?

i am willing to offer 30 minutes for free.

Hello EF fellows, this is Marina, a new Portuguese tutor on board! Well, I think it is important for the student to have the option to choose a tutor that would fit their expectations. However, it is relevant to consider that they are able to start their tutor choice right at the moment they take a look at the tutors profiles. Then, I think it would be fair for them to have 20 minutes for free, if they don’t fell comfortable with the first tutor they have the possibility to have 2 more options, but still with 20 minutes for free.

Thanks for the great feedback and ideas, keep them coming!

Tina, I think it should be standard for all

Tina, I think it should be standard for all

@Enrique – I think that’s still up for debate right now (whether these should be mandatory/standard). However, my instinct is that allowing a teacher to opt out of a free Introduction is probably a good thing for two reasons. First, while most of us on here are more concerned with finding new students I’d venture to say that for some time is more important. When faced with the choice of being on here doing an introduction where they aren’t getting paid or having that time free they’d opt for the latter. I think that’s the minority of people but they’re still out there. Second, there likely could be tutors here who simply aren’t looking to bring on new students (they already have a sufficient number of students). For those tutors, there wouldn’t be much upside in bringing on new students.

Having said all that, we currently control for that by allowing teachers to simply not set themselves as “Ready to Teach” when they are online @ eduFire. The same could be done here instead of allowing teachers to opt out of this.

hehehe, not easy to reach a consensus, lol….

Ok,, let me throw some gasoline in here. I´m willing to give a trial lesson of 15 minutes. Neither 30 nor 10, but 15 min. :P

I quite like the 5 min to go warning sign.I find this to be a good idea because sometimes students can try and linger, and it may get awkward for a tutor to remind a student that their time is up.

I like the idea of the 30min free session with something that tracks on a student’s page how many free sessions they have had. I think a tracker would deter people from trying to work the system too much while giving the tutor a better idea of where to start so you don’t waste any of the time during the actual session. Students can tell if they can learn with someone or not so it would benefit both parties. I think Sandy had some other great ideas with the bonus lesson or some sort of discount code and a discount for tutors.

Hi fellow EduFire people! Interesting and very important discussion!
I personally am one of those tutors that Jon is concerned about: time is more important to me. I am also really in favor with Sandy’s post of a customer-service oriented model of tutoring. But here are my two cents on this topic.

I am for a “no more than 10-15 minute(w/message), unlimited, free trial session” for students. We all are on sites such as eBay and Amazon for years and decades, and putting a limit on the # of trials is bad business. That said, a trial is an introduction and interview of tutor and student to get a feel for each other, and nothing more, so it shouldn’t be considered as a “lesson” per se, so I’ll call it a “Intro”.

I suggest tutors have the flexibility if they want to allow a free " Intro" available button or something on their profile, and maybe a “continue to first lesson” function for those who want to jump right into a (paid, 1h) lesson. These "Intro"s must have a request in advance function as the regular lessons do.

Now, since the student has this additional advantage to shop around before they invest, there should be equal seller-protection for the tutors, and here are my suggestions. Along with the request “Intro” in advance function, and the flexibility of choice to have an “Intro” button displayed or not, I suggest having a counter of how many "Intro"s and “No-shows” a student has had in the past few months or so.

In addition to the counter idea, I suggest a “no-show” penalty in payment form, too. If the student is not online at the promised “Intro” time or regular “Lesson” time (15 min after the start of the lesson time) and they have not sent the tutor an email(with the reason they are late), they will get a “no-show” counter AND charged a 20% fee of the tutor’s lesson fee. This is necessary since making time to be online whether it is for an “Intro” or a “Lesson” is a commitment a tutor has to make, and should be compensated for. It would also be a deterrent for those free-tutorial-hoppers, and prevent tutors like my self for wasting time waiting for a no-show student, which wasn’t really serious about the lesson (or bother to communicate with the tutor) in the first place.

Whew! That was long, but I find it necessary to have the Freedom & Flexibility of the " Intro " function to be in hand in hand with the Responsibility from the student. Thanks for reading!

Wren

I agree with all above.But here i just want to point out that our system should add a function to punish those students who request sessions but don’t show up at the scheduled time.This behavior is not acceptable.It happened twice to me !!!
I think our system should to something to prevent this happening .

Yes, Leo, and I know we are not the only tutors that had No-shows! Wren

Hi Wren, I like your ideas. You are right, students too have a responsibility – and it also happened twice to me that a student did not show up.

i don’t mind giving student free lesson 10, 20, 30 minutes, Really. I plan to refer to Edufire on my faculty website so that way prosperity student can find out whether s/he wants to continue, they can sign up at my community college or stay with me online. Frankly I have not done like this yet. Im sure with the link i might get some prosperity students online! :-)

I agree that the system should alert the student that time is almost up. It should also alert that time is up and give an option to the student to extend the session for an additional hour and be billed as such. If the student chooses to do so, then the teacher should be able to approve it as well. That way the pressure is not on the teacher to end the session, and handle billing issues, and uncomfortable time overages.

I think the system should send a reminder via messages, to the student and teacher. I don’t like getting the messages via email, and would rather they are sent to my messages. Then community members should have the option to receive notifications via email.

Also, something to consider is that we should have a standard time that we wait when someone (teacher or student) is late to the session. Like the classroom automatically closes after 15 minutes, or whatever length of time, if a second participant does not show up. That way no one is waiting. Once you have this all in place then you can think about punishing no shows.

Today I thought I had a session and I jumped online early to get into the classroom, and my internet was having issues. I did not get on till 22 minutes after the class was scheduled. Once I was able to get on I realized the class was not today, but if it had been what could I have done? Tech issues and emergencies happen, so does forgetfulness. So how do we handle that?

Perhaps students should also have a scoring system. The tutors should be able to evaluate them as well, based on punctuality/attendance. Then tutors can use their score to evaluate if the student is worth their time especially if they have no showed all of the 10 classes they signed up for, for example. Just a few thoughts.

I have mixed up my class dates and missed two classes by mistake. I have also been stood up by a teacher once. No biggie, he mixed the dates up too.

I think all of these issues can be remedied by having the ability to allow multiple students into the classroom with a single tutor. That way if 4 of 5 scheduled students show up, the tutor has not wasted their time.

Tina:

Multiple students in a classroom has its pros and cons.

I will just mention here one point: Level of knowledge. The participants MUST be of the same level. You can’t put people of different levels in the same class.
Who and how will evaluate these students levels?

I don’t really think multiple students is that much of an issue, or it has more advantages than disadvantages. Evaluations only go so far, people aren’t honest (perhaps unintentionally) and one person’s perception of ‘intermediate’ is always different from somebody else’s.

Providing every student knows and is content join a multiple class and the tutor is happy tutoring then great!

Marco:

Good point Enrique, but I’ll leave that for somebody else to answer because I’m interested to see what people think. I’m not against the idea, I think it should be optional for sure. :)

It would be wonderful to have a standardized test posted here on edufire where tutors could briefly measure a students linguistic ability. I was sent to another site prior to one of my Spanish sessions to take a test to see where my Spanish was at. Why not have something of this nature here.

Tina:

That’s more or less what I’m talking abouy.

BUT, we must also measure oral communication. If the tests are only, reading, writing, and grammar…they do NOT give an accurate indicator as to their oral communication….

Got it! I see where you are coming from.