[HN Gopher] Launch HN: UPchieve (YC W21 Nonprofit) - Live tutori...
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Launch HN: UPchieve (YC W21 Nonprofit) - Live tutoring for low-
income students
Hi everyone! My name's Aly, and I'm the founder of UPchieve
(https://upchieve.org). I'm here with UPchieve's CTO, Dave
(thedevelopnik). We're an edtech nonprofit that provides free, 24/7
online tutoring to low-income high school students. The idea for
UPchieve was based on my own personal experience as a low-income
student. I was raised by a single mom who was an immigrant to the
US and often couldn't help me with schoolwork and applying to
college. So I went to a community college, and from there it took
me 6 years to transfer to and graduate from a 4-year university.
College is not the only way for a low-income student to achieve
upward mobility, but research shows it's one of the most reliable.
That was the story for me, too. Transferring to Penn helped me get
a job on the trading floor at J.P. Morgan, where I immediately made
3x as much as my mom straight out of college. I soon began looking
for ways to give back and help other students like me get to
college. Volunteering as a math tutor seemed like a great choice
because I had tutored my way through HS and college and knew a lot
about it, but I couldn't find any existing volunteer opportunities
that fit with my work schedule. That's when I first came up with
the idea for UPchieve: an open source platform that could meet the
needs of both younger-student-me (who needed help with schoolwork
and college apps, often late at night in my home) and older-
volunteer-me (who needed a flexible and convenient way to give
back). Students can use UPchieve 24/7 to request and get paired
with a live tutor in 5 mins, and volunteers select their
availability and then wait for a text notifying them that a student
needs their help. You can see a demo of both the student and
volunteer side of the platform here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SufRUje0XiM Over the next two
years, I realized that many other people cared about what I was
doing and wanted to volunteer to help build the platform and tutor
students. I also learned more about the state of education in the
US and discovered that the gap in college completion rates between
low- and high-income students hadn't changed at all in 10+ years!
This led me to grow more and more passionate about both the need
for and potential of a platform like UPchieve. In 2018, I finally
quit my job at J.P. Morgan to work on UPchieve full-time, with the
new goal of scaling free tutoring to all low-income HS students
across the US. UPchieve is completely free for eligible students,
and it only costs us $10 to give one student an entire year of
unlimited academic support. For reference: online tutoring
companies charge students $35 per hour on average. Other existing
nonprofit tutoring models are prohibitively expensive and difficult
to scale, due to factors like 1) cost of paid tutors, 2) in-person
delivery, and 3) long-term commitments required of students and
tutors. We're also working to become 100% self-sustaining (i.e.,
not dependent on donations). Companies like Verizon and Goldman
Sachs pay us to provide virtual volunteer opportunities to their
employees. Many big companies have budgets set aside specifically
for volunteer opportunities because studies have found that
employees who volunteer are more likely to stay at the company. So
far, we've helped more than 7,000 students and matched more than
30K on-demand requests for tutoring. My favorite part of my job has
been reading the hundreds of comments we get from students each
month, telling us how we're helping them kick ass in their classes
and that they can't imagine life without us. It's literally the
best feeling ever. You can see some of my favorite student feedback
here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1w3nqHSNiP-2270_Qxjvy... If
you like what we're doing and want to help, please consider signing
up to volunteer--we especially need more statistics, calculus, and
physics tutors! Use this link to sign up and you'll bypass our
waitlist: https://app.upchieve.org/sign-up. Alternatively, you can
also support our work by donating at
https://secure.givelively.org/donate/upchieve. We're currently
covering 35% of our budget with revenue, but we still need
additional funding to reach sustainability. We'd be so grateful for
your support! Finally, we'd love to hear your thoughts on what
we're doing! Please leave a comment with your feedback, ideas, and
even criticisms--we can't fix it if we don't know about it. :)
Thank you!
Author : alymurray
Score : 101 points
Date : 2021-05-11 14:53 UTC (8 hours ago)
| llaolleh wrote:
| 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.
| alymurray wrote:
| 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 :)
| llaolleh wrote:
| 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.
| sarora27 wrote:
| 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.
| thedevelopnik wrote:
| 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.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 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!
| thedevelopnik wrote:
| 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.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Thank you
| DanBC wrote:
| 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.
| clairity wrote:
| 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.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| 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
| thedevelopnik wrote:
| Yeah, to be clear, we absolutely see it as our
| responsibility to minimize risk and do everything we can to
| protect our students.
| alymurray wrote:
| 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)!
| clairity wrote:
| 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.
| alymurray wrote:
| 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.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| 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!]
| alymurray wrote:
| 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!
| mullr wrote:
| > 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.
| alymurray wrote:
| 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!
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| 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
| alymurray wrote:
| 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.
| okprod wrote:
| 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.
| gault8121 wrote:
| Congratulations Aly! It's Peter Gault from Quill. What's next on
| your roadmap? What are you hoping to achieve over the next year?
| alymurray wrote:
| 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.
| gault8121 wrote:
| 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...
| thedevelopnik wrote:
| 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
| gault8121 wrote:
| 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.
| avinassh wrote:
| Can anyone from any location use this?
|
| Also, you mentioned it's open source, link to the source?
| alymurray wrote:
| 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
| thedevelopnik wrote:
| Aly posted the link to source, if you're interested in getting
| involved email me at dave.sudia at upchieve dot org
| ashtonbaker wrote:
| 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.
| alymurray wrote:
| 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
| endisneigh wrote:
| 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).
| llaolleh wrote:
| 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.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| 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 :)
| alymurray wrote:
| 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.
| thedevelopnik wrote:
| 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.
| alymurray wrote:
| 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.
| redkoala wrote:
| 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.
| alymurray wrote:
| 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!
| btown wrote:
| 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 :)
| thedevelopnik wrote:
| 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.
| btown wrote:
| 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!
| alymurray wrote:
| 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!
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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?
| alymurray wrote:
| 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!
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway959504 wrote:
| Why do you serve only US students? There are lots of
| underprivileged students outside.
| alymurray wrote:
| 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!
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(page generated 2021-05-11 23:00 UTC)