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Key takeaways from the April 2021 educator survey
Highlights from our most recent educator survey, including how we’re addressing family communication struggles, helping you enforce age range criteria for your classes, and celebrating successful scheduling changes.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the April 2021 educator survey. As always, we’re so grateful for your feedback on how things are going and how we can improve your experience at Outschool.

📅🙌🏽 Shoutouts for scheduling

In previous surveys, many of you have shared feedback about scheduling being a difficult and tedious task. In response, we’ve made some improvements that we’re happy to hear have made a difference.

  • “I think scheduling was one thing I was thinking of…being able to use the month calendar so I can see the big picture…but you have already worked on this :)”
  • “The most recent ability to add sections from the calendar page is amazing!”

While we know that our scheduling tools are far from perfect, we welcome this positive feedback. The Outschool product and engineering teams are eager to continue working hard building these improvements for you.

A deeper dive into family communication

We’re always working hard to make improvements to family communication. In March, we added learner @mentions and e-mail notifications in response to your feedback, and we know there are still more ways to make this system better. When we zeroed in on key issues from the April survey, the most common theme we saw was related to communications with Outschool families being housed in too many places (e.g. email, conversations tab, and the classroom page). In the upcoming weeks, we’re going to spend more time coming up with solutions to the problems you cited most frequently in the survey.

Here are some examples of this feedback:

  • “Make email chains with parents easier to read. The latest message gets buried in the thread and is hard to find. Can’t the most recent message just go on top?”
  • “I still feel like communication between teachers and parents is confusing for parents. I believe it would be a huge improvement to streamline communication. There shouldn’t be so many different ways to send & receive messages.”

Evaluating age range criteria

In addition to quantitative data on parents enrolling outside of a specified age range, we set out to learn more about the extent of the pain point from your perspective. Some of you have shared that age range requirements should be strict when necessary, but also allow for flexibility depending on the type of class being offered.

Our results showed that for ~20% of the educators who responded to our survey, this is a problem they encounter quite frequently. In order to reduce the burden on educators, our team is going to be making improvements to the enrollment modal very soon to address this challenge (more details below). Ultimately, we want to ensure that educators and parents have more tools to navigate whether or not a class is a good fit for a learner.

So, what’s next?

In the upcoming days, our team will be launching a few new features. Here’s a preview:

  • In the next week, educators will have the ability to set “strict age ranges” for classes that you’re offering. When a learner falls outside of this age range, parents will be prompted to complete a special request that requires the educator to approve the enrollment.
  • In the next month, we’ll be rolling out “Learner Notes” which will give all educators the ability to write private notes about learners in their classes. We’ve heard that it can be difficult to keep track of details pertaining to the many learners that you teach, and we hope that this tool will allow you to better manage your relationships with learners in your classes.

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