15th February 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
So, I haven’t finished categorising the qualifications yet. In fact, I’m only down to 6,000, and checking my blog last week I can see that that means only 3,000 in the last 7 days. However, this is only partly my fault, and I haven’t been skiving off. I was originally not categorising qualifications where tutors had entered all their GCSEs or A levels in one line (e.g. GCSE Maths, English, Science...), rather than entering them individually.
The trouble was that I overlooked the possibility that students may do this too, and if I don’t categorise all these ‘grouped qualifications’ we might not be searching for a tutor for a student. I thought that it was reasonable to ask tutors to enter qualifications individually because if they’re serious about becoming tutors then it’s an insignificant amount of effort, but I’m aware that some students will be contacting lots of tuition agencies, and will be understandably lazy in not entering each qualification individually.
I had got the number of uncategorised qualifications down to 6,000, only to see it jump to 9,000 again when I realised that I had to look again at the grouped qualifications. The finish line is now in sight though, and I’m certain that within a few days the task will be done.
I’m quite busy this week though; training someone to assess tutors tomorrow, and then I’m in Cambridge on Wednesday to meet some potential programmers for online tuition. I haven’t mentioned our online tutoring programme for a month or so, but what happened was that the people I met before Christmas weren’t able to help as much as I had hoped. A positive from those meetings though, was that I have much better idea of the software we’re going to use, and I’ll be meeting some of the most gifted young programmers in the UK this week, so I’m hopeful that things will start to take off.