We know how important it is for educators and organizations who build their businesses on Outschool to feel prepared and informed about upcoming changes to our platform. With this in mind, we recently shared a big picture look at some improvements and additions you’ll see coming to Outschool over the next few months.

This week, we’re bringing you an update on new feature releases and tests that are in action or coming soon this month!

Giving parents the option to pause

One of the most common feature requests we hear from parents is the option to pause or skip a week of enrollment in an ongoing class. We know some educators do support this manually for individual families, but it’s time-consuming! So we’ve been hard at work developing and testing a pause function that helps both parents and educators manage ongoing enrollments more effectively.

Starting April 19, 2023, all parents will see a new option to Pause Enrollment for any ongoing class, for any number of weeks.

While their enrollment is paused, they will not make payments, will not have access to the classroom or recordings, and their spot in the class is not guaranteed. However, if there’s still an open seat on their re-enrollment day, they’ll be automatically added back to the class roster!

Here’s how it works:

1. Parents select the Pause Enrollment option and are taken to the screen below. Then, they can select which weeks they would like to skip and see all the relevant info about pausing.

• No payments while absent
• Seat is not reserved
• No access to the classroom

2. While enrollment is paused, the learner’s seat is not reserved, and educators may accept a new enrollment to fill that seat. If a family would like to hold a seat while absent from class, they will need to keep their enrollment active and pay full price for that week.

3. If a seat is still available on their chosen resume date selected by the parent, then the learner will be automatically re-enrolled and charged for the upcoming week as usual. If there are NO seats available on the resume date, then the parent will receive an email letting them know that the class is full and they have been automatically unenrolled from the class.

The option to pause will be automatically added to all ongoing classes once this update goes into effect within the next few weeks, and educators don’t need to take any action! We hope this option makes it easier for parents to return to their favorite classes after taking a necessary break, without hindering educators’ ability to connect with new learners and fill empty seats. View additional info in our ongoing class support article.

Bringing clarity to payouts

We’ve heard your feedback that you’d like better visibility into the payouts you receive from Outschool.

After conducting interviews and learning more about what could improve your payout experience, we’re beta-testing a new payout process. With this update, educators and organizations receive one payout per day, instead of one payout per section.

Educator testers are also providing feedback on new payout reports that provide detailed info about each payment and its corresponding sections.

We expect to roll out this change to all educators and organizations within the next few weeks. We’re giving you a heads-up now so you can make any necessary adjustments to your payment tracking processes ahead of the change. You’ll receive an e-mail alert and see a pop-up on your dashboard when this update goes into effect!

Weekly payments update: Launching to parents

Thank you to all our educators who have updated the payment options for their multi-week classes! We will launch these new weekly payment options (only for classes that have opted in) to the first group of parents next week. A small group of parents will be shown the option first, and we’ll slowly ramp up to 50%, then 100%, of parents.

If you have added this option to any classes, you may see “pay weekly” enrollments starting soon!

As always, if you have any questions about our platform updates or ideas on what could improve your Outschool experience, please reach out to us via chat or at support@outschool.com.