Upswing Product Update — May 14, 2020
We at Upswing hope that y’all have been staying safe and taking good care during these unusual times, and that you’ve been finding ways to stay connected to your friends, family, and coworkers. In addition to designing features, writing code, and squashing bugs, the Upswing team has been coming together virtually for Pictionary, Ted Talk discussions, and Happy Hours — highly recommend! 😄
With our partners’ user experience and feedback in mind, we’ve made some recent product enhancements that we’re excited to share with you. It’s product update time!
Segmented Tutor Access
We heard from some of our partners that to be able to fully support special programs such as TRIO students or student athletes, we would have to reserve certain tutors for access only by those special populations.
Upswing can now do this for schools with our “Add Additional Group Access” feature. For each configuration, one or more student groups are given access to one or more groups of tutors. You can see below in our example that we have designated certain tutors as “TRIO Tutors”, and the first configuration gives only the “TRIO Student Group” access to “TRIO Tutors”. TRIO students also have access to generic, non-TRIO tutors as well:
“My Classes” Section added to Student’s Tutoring Page
For our partners who have provided us enrollment data, we are so excited to present our first (of many!) developments to improve the Upswing student experience! Students will now be able to see the classes in which they are enrolled right from the Tutoring tab of their Upswing dashboard. With one click of the “View Coaches” button, they will be shown search results of tutors ready to assist them! 🤩
Each course will be listed by its full name, the professor’s name, and the course number (If any information besides the class name is not available, the class box will still display whatever information is available):
Another helpful feature is that students won’t even have to click on the “View Coaches” button to see how many coaches are available to meet for the subject. Beneath the “View Coaches” button is a number indicating how many coaches are available for that subject. If at least one coach is available, the message will read “X Coach(es) Available Now” in green. If no coaches are available, this line will not appear underneath the “View Coaches” button (note: the word “tutor” and “coach” is interchangeable and is defined on a per school basis.).
This functionality is available to colleges that provide Upswing with their student enrollment data each semester. For more information on how to get your information integrated with Upswing, please reach out to your HERO!
Improved Ana send times through Twilio Messaging Services
We have been working diligently to improve our Ana chatbot capabilities, and with our upgrade to using Twilio Messaging Services, we will see increased reliability and better reporting which we hope to share with you in the future!
