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Responding to Session Requests

italki would like each teacher to respond to each and every session request.  Whether or not you can attend the session, please respond when a student asks for your time.  If you can't / don't want to attend, please Reject the session.  If you will attend and teach the student, Confirm it.  If you you need to change something, please do that before you confirm.

Responding to Session Requests IS ESSENTIAL!  If you ignore 3 or more session requests, we will contact you and you may be disallowed from using the Language Marketplace.  When you signed up to be a teacher, you agreed to Terms and Conditions, among these is to be active on the site and respond promptly to students.

We understand that there are certain times and situations when you can't respond to the session requests.  We're working on a solution for requests over too short of time, say 3 hours between request made and scheduled. 

What other reasons do you have for not responding to session requests?

We want to make an option for you to indicate you're on vacation and not able to teach for some period of time.  Would that be helpful?  How would you want it to work? What would your vacation notice look like?
Here are a few possibilities:
- auto responder (like email) ?
- calendar alteration ?
- hidden profile ?
- popup over your profile ?
- other ideas ?

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Hello.

I agree that this is a good idea - I have 4 sessions that I have failed to respond to and it annoys me everytime I see it.  I only failed to respond because students booked them 2 minutes before we had agreed to meet and I couldn't confirm them quickly enough!  Now my page is scarred ;)

As for the vacation time, I think there are some problems here - for example, I really like the idea of a pop-up but some people will have these blocked anyway.  Hidden profiles are always a bad idea for our advertising.  Some students do book weeks in advance.  I don't like the idea that my current students might think that I have disconnected from Italki or something similar...I think this would just cause confusion.  Maybe something like an auto responder would be a good idea - it is pretty instant and then the student will know to rebook.  Maybe we can specify how long we will be away for and make the message personalised...?

Many thanks for your continued guidance and assistance!

Kayleigh

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The most helpful solution for me would be to notify me by email when I have a session request. I do all my work on the internet and it slows my browser down if I have too many pages open at once, so I rely on email notifications for all of the freelance work I do. I saw on my page that I have one missed session request, but I never received an email about it. I am also confused about why one of my session requests has expired. A girl scheduled a free trial with me for this Thursday, and I had to change the time because of a prior commitment, but now it says that the request has expired. I don't understand. Please help!
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Hi, Pacifistsc. For the email informing teachers about session, italki does send out emails to teachers when they have new session request. Can you check the spam folder of your email and see whether you have received any. I think the session is expired because the student didn't find out that you have changed the time of the session.
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Ms Help, thank you for responding to my post. I did not find a notification in my spam folder. Is it possible that maybe my student saw that I changed the time of the session and she tried to change it again, and I didn't receive an email about it? Does italki send out email notifications when a student/teacher changes the time of a session, or do you just send out an initial email? I think it would be helpful to receive email notifications about any changes made to session requests. Another idea I had is if instead of a popup on your page when you have a session request, perhaps you can do a sound notification. Like when someone enters text into the chat window, there is a sound notification to let you know. I think that would be very helpful, and it would solve the issue of popup blockers. Also if you could have the home page automatically refresh itself every 5 minutes or so that would be helpful too. Just a few ideas. Thanks for your help!
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Would it be possible for the teacher to choose the time between the lesson request and the start time? I have other commitments and I can't be online all day everyday. I would prefer to have 2/3 days notice before a lesson is scheduled.

Also, for holidays, how about a calender on our profile to show any days/weeks we are unavailable.

Thanks

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Thank you for the suggestions, Anna.  We are in the process of updating the reservation system so that both the student and teacher have more advanced notice. 

We are working on a solution for the holidays schedule as well, but that is a bit more complex.
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