I note that the student sign-up uses zip-code to try and classify low-income students. I live in the low-income part of a rich city (Menlo Park), and the whole city just has one zip code. This would exclude a lot of the low-income students who live in my neighborhood. I used to be a volunteer tutor with the local boys and girls clubs of America (bgca.org) chapter and the students who would attend there were exactly the demographic you’re targeting. I know you partner with some schools, but you might want to also consider using organizations like bgca as an alternative way of identifying these kids. You probably don’t want to go to the schools in this area and have them stigmatize the low income students by presenting the app as being just “for the poor kids”

Thanks for calling this out. It’s not that obvious, and we need to make some improvements, but there is a way to get access if you don’t qualify by zip code/school.

If a student does not automatically qualify, we offer them basically an appeal form where they can say how much their family makes among other things. And we do qualify a number of students that way.

Partnering with other orgs like BGCA is an awesome idea that I will pass to our outreach coordinator. Thank you!

You probably want to start from this.

I grew up on the bottom rung of our local socioeconomic ladder, and self-selected out of a lot of potential opportunities because I knew I would be excluded.

Do you mean that you didn't want to be labeled "low-income"? If so, I relate. There were definitely periods when I was growing up that I was eligible for free or reduced price lunch but was too embarrassed to accept it.

We try to avoid using the word "low-income" in all of our student-facing communications for exactly this reason. For example, this is how we talk about eligibility on the students' page of our website (https://upchieve.org/students):

"Is This Really Free? YES! UPchieve is a nonprofit organization that exists to help students achieve their academic goals. Any student whose family can’t afford a private tutor or admissions consultant is eligible for free tutoring and college counseling through UPchieve. Instead of charging you, we rely on volunteers and donations to provide you with free academic support."

One of my long-term goals with UPchieve is actually to destigmatize being a low-income student. It's obviously not the student's fault if their family can't afford something. (In fact, it's probably not their parents' fault either.) Not sure exactly how we'll do this yet, but I hope that we can :)

Congrats! This looks very cool at a glance.

I tutored math for extra cash in grad school, and I was almost exclusively hired by well-off local families so that their their high schoolers could improve from an A-minus to an A, ace the AP Test, test into Calculus 2 at UMich, and have a leg up getting into the business school. I loved talking about calculus every day, but it felt like I was participating in a weird arms race between these parents, and upholding a status quo that I really don't agree with.

Tutoring other students in undergrad was much more fun and rewarding -- even though the pay was 1/6 the rate -- because it was paid for by the university and anyone could walk in and get help.

I hope this turns out to be sustainable, as I'd love to give some of my time to it.

Thanks! I hope we end up sustainable too. :)

I also did a lot of paid tutoring for more privileged kids in HS and college, so I can relate. Fortunately that experience ended up being very useful in starting UPchieve!

Based on your past experiences, it sounds like you'd be an awesome volunteer! If you want to just learn more about the volunteer experience you can check out this page on our site: https://upchieve.org/volunteer

Working my way through the onboarding process :)

I've seen similar programs like this - generally the issue is with the supply side. Volunteering generally isn't enough to overcome the gap. How do you plan to resolve this issue? This becomes more of a problem as the content becomes more complicated (e.g. even a smart person working at a great company would have to brush up on physics, so either you're dealing with an inherently scarce set of people who remember high school physics, or another scarce set of people who willing to brush up on physics to tutor individuals for free).

Woo, first comment! Thanks, endisneigh.

Supply is definitely going to be a challenge for us in the long term. We think we’ll need over a million volunteers someday to support all 8 million low-income HS students in the US. However, at least during COVID-19, we found it really easy to recruit volunteers because everyone was looking for virtual opportunities. At one point we amassed a wait list of over 10K people who wanted to volunteer with us.

I think one thing we have going in our favor in the long run is that we designed the volunteer opportunity to be convenient enough that even busy professionals should be able to take part. Volunteers have complete control over their own schedule and how much time they want to work with students in any given week/month/year.

One study found that 50% of Americans say that they want to give back but can’t because of time and schedule constraints. About a third of Americans are college-educated and likely able to tutor at least one subject, so that puts us at about 50M potential volunteers just in the US who might be both qualified and interested in our volunteer opportunity.

Through corporate partnerships with big companies and potentially even clubs on college campuses, we’re hopeful we can recruit enough volunteers to meet student demand in perpetuity. And to address your point about recruiting for harder subjects… another thing we have in our favor is that the distribution of individuals qualified to help with different subjects matches up pretty well with the distribution of students needing help in different subjects. Our most popular subjects on the platform are actually lower-level math subjects like Algebra 1 and Geometry, and those are also the subjects volunteers are most likely to get certified in.

It would be good if your non-profit's economic model eventually allows you to hire a core team of trained teachers and supplement with volunteers. You can also allow college students to mentor high school students for credit experience and offer a letter of experience.

We'd love to figure out ways to reward volunteers for their service via badges/certificates, letters of recommendation, or potentially even college credits (e.g., if we could convince teaching colleges to give their students credit for tutoring students on UPchieve)!

Recruiting retired teachers could be a good option for us too since they have the expertise of a highly trained teacher without the cost. At a minimum, I agree we need to invest even more into the training of the volunteers!

You're absolutely right. I think the biggest barrier would be brushing up on these topics. I haven't touched these subjects in 5+ years. Teaching requires one more plane of understanding.

Dave, UPchieve CTO here. A really cool thing that's happened over the last year is we've gotten lots of volunteer sign ups from retired people, who were really trapped at home from fear of COVID, who have lots of time to brush up on physics/calculus/etc. I don't think that's something we could have predicted about the marketplace of students/volunteers but has helped a lot. Even now that things are opening up, they're staying with us and continuing to pick up lots of sessions. They enjoy the mentorship aspect and brushing up on the academics is a fun thing for them to do.

We give volunteers review materials to help them brush up, and to be honest... even the best tutors have to Google things occasionally to refresh their memories during a live tutoring session. :) But yeah, it does take some investment on the part of the volunteer if they haven't looked at a specific subject in 5+ years.

I think that’s a feature, not a bug - part of the reason I’d like to tutor high school calculus students is so I have an excuse to revise that stuff again - I finished an MS in math and statistics last year, but it’s probably been 8 years since I last did high school / freshman calculus :)

I will definitely check it out and give you feedback. A service like this is definitely something I might have benefited while I was struggling in a low income household in an extremely high cost of living area.

It wouldn't have to be just for tutoring, but it can help in terms of mentorship and just learning from older people with more real life experience and career.

Thank you so much for sharing your personal connection! I really relate and wish I'd had more mentors growing up too. But at least we can change that for future students! I look forward to hearing your feedback and if we're lucky maybe even having you volunteer with us :)

Here are my thoughts. I like the simplicity of the UI, and it's pretty snappy. I've done 2 of the quizzes, and they are pretty fair. As expected I've forgotten a lot so I will have to review.

Other thoughts: - I thought the signup buttons/some action buttons could use a color contrast - some of them were hard to see visually. - Some of the visual indicators when the mouse hovers over a button/action would be nice, just so the user knows which items are more clickable - more affordances can be nice. - I put in my preferred name to be called during sign up.IF you are going to do verification, maybe you can make that clear. Or have the option to keep a nickname. - The profile page needs more information for editing and display. But I think it is probably on your backlog.

Woo, I am so excited to hear that you signed up and already tried taking a quiz! Appreciate all the feedback, and we will definitely work on the things you mentioned. Feel free to reach out via the AC community slack if you ever need anything - hopefully we get to meet at a coach meeting sometime!

I imagine the set of volunteers willing to commit just an hour in advance to being available for, say, the following two hours, is much more massive than the set of volunteers able to commit to continuity for weeks or months. But continuity of mentorship and long-term trust can be absolutely critical for many learners.

Do you see yourselves taking a hybrid approach to this to optimize on that spectrum? Can someone get involved if their schedule is too unpredictable to do anything but the former? As a startup cofounder who would love to teach, I’m very much asking for myself :)

Volunteers can set availability, but they can also just hang out on their dashboard. As student requests come in, we immediately show them on the volunteer dashboard where a volunteer can immediately pick them up, and only start texting people if the request is not taken up. We offer optional browser notifications when new requests come in. So it's totally possible to volunteer with us on an ad-hoc basis!

To your excellent point about continuity, relationships are definitely a component of effective tutoring, but in our user research and conversations with students, students themselves told us it was more important to be able to get help when they need it than to be able to get help from the same person every time, and that's the need we've decided to optimize for.

I think as someone who would be further in the volunteer category than the student category (probably most folks in HN i would wager) The thing I get out of it is the relationship. I get the little ego boost of knowing that the particular kid i'm working with appreciates and needs my help. If I am being randomly paired with one of 100 random kids, 75 of which are being sat in front of the computer as 'productive' babysitting by their parents I might have less of a rewarding experience.

Is there some mechanism by which volunteers can find an appreciative student and re-match with them exclusively?

Typically students find us and use us on their own (no parental involvement). We don't market our site towards parents at all. The result is that most of the students using our site actually DO want to be there, and they are often very grateful for the help.

It's really common for students to thank their tutors at the end of the session and leave comments in the post-session feedback form saying how awesome the tutor was. Right now we're just sharing that feedback with the volunteers ad hoc, but we'd like to find a better system to share it regularly.

We're also planning to launch a volunteer favoriting feature for students later this year, which will increase the likelihood of students and volunteers who get along well having future sessions with each other. It's actually a commonly requested feature from both students and volunteers!

That's good to hear that you've been marketing it in a way that discourages parents from using it as free babysitting, or worse, punishment! I hope that you can manage to keep it that way. Every source of free tutoring I've ever been involved with has quickly devolved into more or less free babysitting for the worst kind of parents.

I wonder if a 'karma' system is possible by which students and tutors could give positive feedback to one another and students could 'unlock' highly rated tutors and visa versa. As someone who has spent a fair amount of time tutoring students (when I was a student myself, admittedly) I can certainly say that tutoring an unappreciative student will quickly sour the experience for a lot of folks, even if the majority are appreciative.

This is an amazing model. Will definitely be brushing off the old math knowledge and signing up!

And hopefully we volunteers as a whole can make the platform feel like a partner that students can continuously rely on!

Woot! I love that sentiment. :) Hope I get to meet you on our volunteer community slack or at one of the (optional) volunteer meetings in the future!

This looks great, thanks for building this!

The problem of how to get revenue, not just donations for something like this is an interesting one. One idea it might be worth exploring is charging colleges in order for them to be able to contact students through the site as part of their efforts to increase diversity (It would need to be opt-in for the students, to maintain their privacy). If you can keep students on the platform through college, you could do the same for employers looking to increase diversity in hiring - maybe the way to do that is encourage students to “graduate” to being volunteers on the platform when they finish high school? Then the (college) students would get the benefit of support and outreach from employers for internships during college, as well as the psychological and learning benefits of tutoring others who are a few years behind them.

I think it would also be interesting to consider making some kind of private social network for your student “alumni” - having a peer group can be super helpful for low-income students in college, so this would hopefully keep them involved with upchieve, make them more likely to succeed in college, and hopefully let you charge companies looking to recruit them.

Happy to chat about this or any other crazy ideas, contact details in my profile

Great ideas, thank you for sharing! I'm also really excited about the potential of current student users to become tutors in the future. Community service is a great way for high school students to build their college applications too, so I think there are actually probably students who would want to use UPchieve both as a student and a volunteer at the same time. Right now our platform would require them to have two accounts, but it's something that we might try to facilitate in the future.

They're nonprofit, so the revenue possibilities are endless -- activating program participants into donors like you say, corporate sponsorship, foundation grants, partnerships with academic institutions, special events, etc.

I signed up, went through the training and did my first tutoring session, ended up being 2.5 hours! Some feedback: Some of the subject quizzes have errors (lack of parens in a math question, diagram now showing up) - it would be good to have a "report this question" to report bugs in these pages as you go through, rather than having to remember and post a bug report later

For the upchieve101 quiz - some of the questions weren't covered in the training (or I missed it e.g. what subjects do students want most help with?).

The implicit bias stuff was annoying - I agree with the idea, but there is little evidence it makes any difference to behavior: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-...

Having to implicitly agree with ideas like "being colorblind is racism" (paraphrasing) was almost enough to put me off continuing - and being told that it was a sign of white racism when I'm a brown immigrant was a little weird and suggested some unhelpful assumptions on the part of the material's author(s)

It was nice to help a student, and I think they learned a lot during the session, but I was surprised how weird it felt not having any audio interaction. Everything took much longer than it would have otherwise.

I understand the need for student safety, but not knowing anything about a student, and knowing I would never know how this student would do in future was also demotivating, it felt like taking part in "mechanical turk for tutoring". I'll try a few more times, maybe I'll get used to it. But rich kids somehow manage to stay safe with online tutors with audio and video, seems a shame to give the poor kids a crappy version of the same thing.

I love what you're doing. These kinds of services are so desperately needed. I used to volunteer for an organization called Build (build.org) and experienced first hand just how powerful mentorship can be.

Thanks! I was a teacher before getting into tech and getting to enable those mentorship opportunities on a large scale was one of the main things that drew me to Aly's project.

Congratulations Aly! It's Peter Gault from Quill. What's next on your roadmap? What are you hoping to achieve over the next year?

Hey Peter! :) Thanks for asking! Some of the things we want to do over the next year include:

1) Expand to offer more subjects. Students ask us all the time for tutoring in English and history. Someday we hope to offer tutoring in every common high school course, including foreign languages and computer science too!

2) Improve the reliability of the site. We have something like 100x as many tutoring sessions happening every day as we did last year, and we need to make substantial changes to the platform to keep up with the usage.

3) Upskill our volunteers to improve the quality of tutoring offered on the site. We want to offer additional training courses on tutoring skills and implement a peer feedback system so volunteers can help each other improve.

4) Reach more students! We want to get the word out to as many students as possible about our free service. If anyone reading can make an intro to a high school or nonprofit who needs us, we'd greatly appreciate your help.

To expand on #2, we are also open source, with our main app code at https://gitlab.com/upchieve/subway

Our long-term goal is to have engaging, fun feature work for community contributors to work on, and we do have those come up occasionally now, but we can use a lot of help just finishing our conversion of the backend to TypeScript, updating dependencies, small bug fixes and similar work, that we have issues ready for.

We also have a weekly tech community Zoom meeting that I'd be happy to send an invite for to anyone who emails me with interest. dave.sudia at upchieve dot org

Yes, that is great to hear! Pre-pandemic, Quill had the most luck with in-person hackathons, where folks could spend a day contributing to Quill, and some of those folks were then interested in staying connected with the work. Hopefully as those events return, you may be able to scale up your community building efforts.

That sounds like a great and ambitious roadmap Aly! :)

Best of luck scaling to support 100x users! In case you are not already using it, New Relic's new program for nonprofits provides their entire platform for free, and it can be really helpful for scaling by seeing how the app is performing. In case you are not already using it, here's the link: https://newrelic.com/blog/nerd-life/introducing-observabilit...

Have you considered partnering with programs like QuestBridge? Their scholarship changed my life. They also offered a junior-year mentorship program with a college admissions newsletter and a complimentary essay-review. I think there's a chance here to collaborate in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade.

Also, are there any plans to offer non-English services? A lot of recent immigrant families would benefit from tutors who are bilingual in their language.

Going from a primarily low-income school to a good college showed me how much of the achievement gap in college between poor and wealthy students simply comes down to tutelage. This kind of work is really important - kudos to your team.

Great suggestions! We partner with some other nonprofits similar to QuestBridge (e.g., College Track), but we're not yet partnered with QuestBridge. It sounds like we should be though—it's awesome to hear how impactful they were on your life!

Re: tutoring in other languages, I completely agree it's needed. We hope we can add tutoring in at least Spanish in the next two years. We've already started asking volunteers during onboarding what other languages they speak, but as of now we don't have enough volunteers fluent in other languages to launch tutoring in those languages.

This is brilliant and I wish you all the very best.

Can I ask about safe-guarding? It's not the first thing you think about but if you cast your mind back to Airbnb or Uber, their biggest issues were safety.

I would imagine background checks would be insufficient - do you plan to monitor / record sessions? What training is in place for the 30k volunteers? Will there be mentors / chaperones who can drop in on calls and check?

Even with the best of intentions a middle aged guy trying to teach statistics for two hours a week to a 16 year old girl is going to be awkward. Without the best of intentions that's a minefield.

That said - hope you blow the doors off!

Thanks! Aly described most of this in a post below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27119947

The scalability our volunteer training effort is definitely something we're actively working on figuring out. We're trying out peer mentoring between volunteers and that has gone really well.

It's also a major reason we are chat/whiteboard only.

Thank you

I have been tutoring here and I have found the platform really well developed for largescale tutoring that avoids any discrimination bias or other ways of ruining young students development and perspective on learning!

Nice!! Thanks for sharing your experience! Completely agree that virtual tutoring (with no audio/video) definitely helps eliminate some of the potential for discrimination bias.

Have you considered a consumer-billing version of this service, for students who are not low-income? For example, charging students for time credits they can use on the app, and paying tutors for their time? Perhaps you could use the revenue from such a service to fund the non-profit side of things.

We've considered it, but one concern that I have is that the paid tutoring space is actually pretty saturated. We'd then be competing with all of those other sites to acquire middle and high income student/parent customers. Maybe we'd be able to get some market share if we played up the impact piece, but I'm still worried it would distract us from our main focus of helping low-income students get to college.

Couldn't check my zoned high school on Firefox mobile, but worked on Chrome.

Thanks for pointing this out! I use Firefox desktop but we don’t really have devices to test with and services like SauceLabs and BrowserStack don’t have non-profit plans so it’s difficult to cover all our bases. Something I’m still working on.

Can anyone from any ___location use this?

Also, you mentioned it’s open source, link to the source?

Volunteer side is open to anyone, anywhere (assuming they are 13+, can get through our screening process, and can pass one of our certification quizzes).

Student side is currently only open to low-income high school students in the US who are 13+. Eligibility is based on a combination of the income demographics of their high school and zip code, but even students who don't pass the "quick check" can apply for access if they feel they are eligible.

https://gitlab.com/upchieve

Aly posted the link to source, if you’re interested in getting involved email me at dave.sudia at upchieve dot org

I love the idea.

How do you stop predatory paedophiles from abusing young people using your service?

> Our coaches will never make you feel bad to ask questions—even the ones you’re too embarrassed to ask in class.

How do you ensure this?

It does look great though.

I knew it was only a matter of time until we got this question. Thanks for asking—it’s important and definitely something we’re concerned about!

We try to prevent abuse through a few measures:

1) The platform is only available to students who are 13+ , and we encourage both students and volunteers to keep their conversations focused on academics. When in a session, students and volunteers only see each other’s first names (which is not a lot to go off of, considering we have users across the country and even some international volunteers).

2) Before volunteers can begin working with students, they have to go through our screening process. Volunteers provide a picture of their photo ID and two references who we contact and ask about their suitability to work with children. A human being reviews all reference forms and runs the name from their ID through the National Sex Offenders Registry.

3) Tutoring sessions on our platform are completed using a whiteboard and text-based chat (no audio and video). We have a chat filter that prevents inadvertent attempts to exchange personal information like phone numbers and emails, and we also block links out to common third-party video conferencing sites like Zoom.

4) Students and volunteers can rate and report each other, and we read through the chat logs of most of the sessions on our platform. Sessions can get flagged for review for tons of different reasons. This is the piece of our process that is least scalable, and we’re still looking for ways to balance quality assurance and safety with scalability.

If you are already keeping the chat logs, maybe you could figure out a way to record the whole session including the whiteboard sessions? Then if you can figure out a way to tag the session’s content appropriately, you would pretty quickly end up with a searchable library of tutoring sessions available on the site (wouldn’t be hard to anonymize them to protect the student and tutor’s privacy). Then you could use the students and volunteers to filter them for quality by making them available in the app / on the site by upvoting etc. That way you would leverage your expensive resource (volunteers) and provide another way for students to benefit if they aren’t in a position to do an interactive tutoring session e.g. on the bus, too noisy at home etc - many low income students have no quiet place at home to do this kind of session because there are just too many people sharing the space.

Getting back to the safety aspect - people are less likely to test the boundaries of your safety rules if they know these (anonymized) sessions will be seen by many other people, and this would massively increase the number of eyeballs for each session further increasing the detection rate of any remaining bad behavior

[Edit - you could also use these recorded sessions to help volunteers get better at teaching, you could get an expert to put together small videos on improving teaching technique with positive and negative anonymized examples from the sessions, then make them available to the volunteer tutors. That could be another low cost and scalable way to reward the tutors - most people who teach would like to get better at it!]

I like your idea about recording the whole session, and it's something I think we should do for numerous reasons, including student safety, volunteer training, and the ability for those recordings to be used for academic research to better understand tutoring. I think depending on the file size it could get quite expensive to store them, but I'll defer to Dave on that!

One thing we probably won't do any time soon is make a library of past sessions available publicly to students. We want to stay firmly in the category of live, personalized support so that we don't overlap with sites like Khan Academy (videos) or Quora/Stack Overflow (asynchronous support).

We do really want to expand our volunteer training and get volunteers to provide feedback to their peers on their sessions though, and I agree the recorded sessions would help a lot with that!

> Tutoring sessions on our platform are completed using a whiteboard and text-based chat (no audio and video).

Have you found that to be sufficient? I recently tried doing some online tutoring, and I found that even with an audio connection, I had a lot of trouble telling if anything I said was landing at all. I came away from the experience rather disillusioned with the idea of trying to do this online at all.

Do you mind me asking what site you tried doing online tutoring for? I'd love to hear more about your experience (both the positives + negatives)!

On our site, students seem to really like the text-based communication because it creates what we call a "judgment-free zone". They have time to think through what they want to say and can end up less embarrassed to admit when they don't understand something.

On the tutor side... yes, it does require the tutors to be particularly engaging and patient. :) Our best tutors try to gauge students' understanding often and ask lots of questions to elicit active participation. Like anything, it just gets easier with practice!

Is this a physical whiteboard or wacom/ipad? Either way this sounds like a really subpar experience of having the teacher write out an equation each time and then return to his keyboard to type the relevant explanation.

What's wrong with just enabling audio?

If I'm understanding your question correctly, it's neither! It's something you'd draw on with your mouse or trackpad on a laptop. We also have other tools you can use to make it easier to tutor math (e.g., ability to add text and shapes to the whiteboard, ability to upload photos of homework, etc.). If you want to see exactly what it looks like, check out this demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SufRUje0XiM

In the future, we actually do plan to add audio to the platform as an optional feature that students can turn on. Most students prefer the text-based communication of our current platform, but there are definitely some who would use audio if given the choice. We still need to think through how to get mutual buy-in from both the student and volunteer in that session as well as whether we want to do additional background screening for volunteers who want to use that feature.

stranger danger boogeymanism is so tiring. if you're worried about pedophiles, you need to be monitoring your own (extended) family first and foremost, then as a distant second, anyone else who regularly spends prolonged amounts of time alone with your child. just like abductions, sexual assault, domestic violence, and pandemics.

That would be true if the advice was for an individual - when your organization is serving children, you have a responsibility to them and their parents to minimize the risk, which is small but non-trivial

Yeah, to be clear, we absolutely see it as our responsibility to minimize risk and do everything we can to protect our students.

Completely agree that this is what it comes down to. We see it as our responsibility to make it hard to use the platform in that way, and of course to respond appropriately if something does happen, but ultimately we cannot control the behavior of students or volunteers. The only way to keep a child completely safe is to never let them interact with anyone (including family)!

yes, certainly doing the low-hanging things that reasonably protect the parties generally makes sense, but an excessive focus on this one issue seems a poor allocation of time and resources.

I completely agree that students in other countries need this too! We decided to start with just the US for two main reasons: 1) we thought the more narrow focus to start would increase our chance of success, and 2) we don't feel we're knowledgable enough to effectively execute on this idea in other countries yet. For example, to offer UPchieve in another country, we'd have to know how to identify if a student is low-income in that country as well as how the typical high school courses in that country match up to the current tutor certifications on our platform.

Since we're open source, I think it'd actually be awesome if someone in another country decided to start their own version of UPchieve for that country!