Background:
The Illinois Tutoring Initiative is a $40M tutoring program whose mission is to provide high-impact tutoring to the millions of students throughout the state of Illinois. ITI is leveraging nearly 10,000 undergrad students across a network of universities, to serve over 90 school districts across the state.
Challenge:
One of the most critical tasks of any tutoring organization is matching students to the instructors who provide them with the greatest probability of success. When it comes to matching students with tutors, there are two important things to consider: mandatory (ie. “must-have”) matching criteria like subject, location, and time, and then preferential (ie. “nice to have”) matching criteria, like hobbies, interests, learning styles, etc.
When ITI matched their first group of 100 students to an initial group of 100 instructors, it took them 3 team members over 5 hours to create the initial matches. Their technology tool was a basic spreadsheet. After finishing the arduous, manual task of matching students with tutors, one of the ITI team members then had to send out individual emails to the 100 tutors asking for confirmation of the match, and then follow up with emails to the 100 students/parents to inform them of their match. Needless to say, the matching process was totally inefficient.
The Pearl solution:
Pearl, along with the help of the Annenberg Institute, saw the effort it took to match the first 100 users and realized that this task would be nearly impossible when the Illinois Tutoring Initiative needed to scale their matching efforts, matching thousands of students to thousands of instructors. And so Pearl set out to build a custom, bulk tutor-student matching algorithm with enough flexibility to allow ITI to set their own standards for mandatory and preferential criteria, as well as automate the instructor-student (or parent) communication after the matches were made.
Pearl’s proprietary tutor-student matching algorithm allowed ITI to match over 200 users in less than 5 seconds!
In the words of one of our customers, “The Pearl enterprise tutoring platform has been an absolute godsend for our team! They’ve been incredible to work with and we’re so pleased with the solution they created for the tutor-student matching process. We now have a much faster, more streamlined matching system and it’s all thanks to Pearl!”