My Cambly Wish List.

I’ve been on Cambly for just under two years now and as I’ve spent a lot of time on the platform, there are of course a few things I’d like to see updated or added to make my life as a tutor a little easier. So here (in no particular order) is my Cambly wish list.

•  An audible reminder when the class timer gets to the final minute or so.  While Cambly has a countdown timer and a pop up reminder at 5 and 2 minutes, these aren’t much help if you are in another tab with the student working on an article or giving some offsite exercises. C’mon Cambly, it’s not hard to code in a few notes or a few beeps to remind us the class is finishing soon.

• Student/Tutor connection indicators.   We’ve all been there, that moment when the connection freezes yet again, the student sounds like a Dalek with a sore throat, and you’re lucky if you hear every third or fourth word! Then it happens…. “Tutor, your connection is terrible. Fix it!”  Really?  I’m on a fiber optic connection of 300MB sec (up AND down), I’m connected to the router via an ethernet cable, and you think it’s MY connection? *sheesh*.  Sadly, a lot of students (and tutors!) think that the pristine image of themselves that they see on their screen is what the person at the other end sees! It’s not. That image is showing you what your camera sees, it’s going to look a whole lot different after traveling several thousand miles!!!  Yes there is a connection test when you first connect, but that’s a test for that moment, not for the whole class. So how about a connection meter or power bars for the tutor and student?   

• Simplify the calendar view for students.  Several students have asked “Tutor, why have you not opened any slots yet” and “Can you open reservations!”  When students look at a tutor’s reservation calendar, fully booked days are grey with only a line underneath.  It’s not obvious what this means and at first glance. If I have a fully booked week, the whole calendar looks grey and it seems no bookings were opened. Several students have told me they thought I was not teaching because they couldn’t  see any classes!

• Improve “Our last chat”.  When you’re tutoring, If you look at “our last chat” straight away it’ll show when you last spoke to the student. But if you don’t think to look at it until a few minutes into the class it says the last chat was “today.”

Why is that even there?  Maybe it’s a bug?

• Update the “1000+ chat” thingy.  As Cambly grows, more and more tutors have been here for a long time and have tutored well in excess of 1000 classes. If you differentiatate tutors by rating, why can you not do so by experience as well?   “3000+ chats” and “5000+ chats” would be nice.

• The rating system. Yeah I’m not going there. I’ll leave that to the Thursday CamDram  club on  Cambly Corner 😛

Until next time. Alice.

“She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it).”

Images from cambly.com used for illustration purposes.