Cambly and Tutor Safety

All Cambly tutors recently received an email about tutor safety. While we here in Camblyland applaud the ongoing and excellent efforts made by Cambly to ‘commit ourselves to tutor safety and create a safe, supportive and comfortable learning community for everyone on Cambly’, there are a few things I noted about the message.

“There is a small percentage of people who abuse the free trial program and commit offensive behaviors” From the outset here, I’m going to go with “offensive behaviors” referring to those nasty students that expose themselves. As I said in my “penis” post… The place for that ugly little thing is in your pants, not in a PH!!

I think this type of behavior would be the main (only?) reason to exclude a large portion of potential paying students from experiencing a trial with the Cambly platform.

Cambly dating..WHAAAAATTTT!!

Also, off topic here for a sec.  I just spotted this on Twitter, it seems that  people are using Cambly as a dating app. No wonder some users are getting the wrong idea! But hey, at least Cambly makes the top 5 😛  *Sarcasm alert*

One  of the things I like about Cambly is that they actively empower their tutors to hide from or ban students if needed (See the post here. ) They also provide an option to turn off the trial students camera, which is another step in the right direction. So if you have a male student who decides to show his pee-pee to the world, you don’t get exposed (excuse the pun) to it. But this brings its own issue. If you see someone doing naughty things, you hit the ban button and they are gone. But you have seen it and that can leave tutors somewhat traumatised to suddenly see a student exposing themselves.  So you turn off the camera for trial lessons and now you only see a black screen. You may think that will help, but now you don’t know what the student is doing and they can happily play away, while you are oblivious, until you finally realise and then ban their sorry ass.  So the answer seems to be to try and prevent these idiots getting onto Cambly in the first place.

OMG yay. No more penises!

This is  exactly what the email was about. “As such, we’ve decided to remove the free trial program in most countries around the world. Free trials will only be offered in limited countries where students are serious about learning.”  OK,  ‘Limited countries’ ? I suppose there is a metric that Cambly can use to see which countries the majority of these people are coming from and ban trials there. I’d also hazard a guess it doesn’t include the country which  (judging by the amount of students I get from there) is Cambly’s largest student base.  But I’m a little confused as to what the “free trial program” is and what is actually being stopped.  I see these things (pic below) all over social media, is this what is being stopped? If not, is this a loophole for the weirdos and freaks???

As I said before, I applaud Cambly for all it does to protect and nurture the tutor community, and it’s very difficult for them to take these assholes completely out of the equation, but this is a step in the right direction and I hope it makes  tutors feel a bit more comfortable and at ease as they work.

Until next time. Alice.

“Haste makes waste, so I rarely hurry. But if a ferret were about to dart up my dress, I’d run.”