How Students Book Your Lessons
As tutors, we normally don't get to see how the booking system works from the student's side, which leads to some unanswered questions such as:
- How does a student book a lesson?
- Can students request a Let's Go lesson if I don't have the tag?
- If I keep an unbooked slot open until the last thirty minutes, will students be able to find me?
Today we’ll answer these questions through a tour of the Engoo and DMM Eikaiwa student website!
1. Choosing a Tutor
First, students will choose a tutor. They'll do this by opening the booking page, where they'll see a menu that lets them select what language they want to study, when they want to book a lesson, and what kind of tutors they're looking for, and more.
Underneath the menu, they'll see a lot of tutors who have open lesson slots. If their favorite tutors have open slots, they'll show up first.
But will students be able to find open lesson slots right up until the last minute? The answer is "almost." Students can book a lesson slot until 15 minutes before the lesson would be due to start. There's actually a panel that features tutors who are available for the next lesson slot, with a timer indicating how much time is left to book their lesson. Here's what it looks like on the DMM Eikaiwa site:
So if you keep your lesson slots open for last-minute bookings, this is where students will find you. As we've previously covered, last-minute bookings are a great way to maximize your income, so make sure to keep your lesson slots open when you can!
2. Deciding what kind of lesson to have
Booking a free-talk lesson or a lesson with Engoo/DMM materials
Once the student has selected a tutor and a lesson time, the following pop-up message appears, allowing them to decide what kind of lesson they want to have.
As you can see, in addition to choosing the lesson material they want to study with, they can also choose if they want to do self-introductions at the start of the lesson and if they want their grammar and pronunciation mistakes to be corrected.
In terms of materials, students have three main options:
- Free Talk.
- Original Materials (made by the Engoo team).
- Publisher Materials (provided by external publishers).
If they select Original Materials, a drop-down menu opens up with the available options:
Booking publisher materials
If a student selects publisher materials, the materials which the tutor can conduct are listed. Here's what it would look like on an Engoo site:
Certain publisher materials, such as Let's Go, will only show up in the list if the selected tutor has the relevant tag. For example, here's a tutor who does have the Let's Go tag:
So there's your answer to "Can students request a Let's Go lesson if I don't have the tag?" Nope, it won't even show up!
Once they've selected a publisher material, they can choose the specific lesson they want to study with. Here, the student is choosing the first lesson of the TOEFL course:
3. After the Lesson
Lesson notes
After the lesson, the student is brought to a Lesson Details page, where they can review who they had a lesson with, their lesson preferences, and notes from their instructor.
DMM Eikaiwa students also have a separate “word list” which shows all of the words that tutors have written in their past lessons. However, this feature is not available to Engoo students.
Accomplishments
DMM Eikaiwa (but not Engoo) students can also see their "achievements," which include:
- How many minutes of lessons they have taken.
- Which level they have reached – there are eight levels, ranging from "visitor" to "legend."
- How many more minutes of lessons they need to take to reach the next level.
They can also see their "medal collection." Students earn medals by taking lessons with tutors from different countries.
We can see that this student likes to take lessons with tutors from the US – they have a gold medal for the US. They also have silver medals for five countries, and bronze medals for the remaining countries. Grayed out medals remind them of which nationalities of tutors they haven't taken lessons with yet.
We hope this answers your questions about how students book your lessons! Happy tutoring!
