The Challenges

As Purple Ruler welcomed more students, the growth has led to more operational complexity and posed a risk to the student experience, which could ultimately drive them away.

• Navigating the virtual classroom: Scheduling classes was complicated with students, parents, and tutors on different platforms, resulting in time slot confusion and a lack of proactive preparation. Student engagement might flatline due to delayed homework grading, which risked course satisfaction and student retention.

  
  

• Elevating teaching excellence: With growing tutor numbers, Purple Ruler needed standard guidelines and tools for consistent and quality classes. This included accessible guidelines, student progress demonstrations, and tools to track student feedback and improvements.

  
  

• Fragmented support, confused students: Communication with students used to span across calls, texts, and emails, leading to confusion and uncertainty about where to start for a new student. This created unnecessary stress for both students and the operations team, and compromised the learning experience.

The Solution

Starting out on Lark for internal communication and class management, Purple Ruler further created a teaching management hub, providing seamless workflows where student onboarding and support, classroom engagement, and tutor management have been combined into one. The power of this unified hub has been impressive: for example, Purple Ruler has reduced program onboarding time for state schools from 15 working days to just 5.

Tangible results, one class at a time

To begin with, Lark Base automates class scheduling at scale, greatly reducing manual work. After a student signs up, the operations team can quickly match available tutors, assign time slots in bulk, and have the automated workflows create calendar invites for both the student and the tutor. Tutors and students can book their classes easily, and start preparing for classes proactively.

Within the same Base, the Purple Ruler team also streamlines post-class routines. After each class, students will be automatically reminded to fill in a feedback form, and tutors will receive feedback once a student submits it. This aids tutors in improving future classes and tracking student reactions, changes, and progress in a timely manner.

Lark Base also automates homework submission for students, relieving tutors from manual messaging. Students will receive a reminder and use a submission form to attach their homework, which then centralizes collection and grading work in one place for tutors. The consolidated view of submissions allows tutors to identify patterns and provide targeted support for students who need extra assistance.

Empower tutors to engage and retain students

As Purple Ruler grows, the team wants to ensure every tutor knows the recipe for teaching a great class. To achieve this, Purple Ruler leverages the Lark Workplace to build a custom portal for tutors. This portal centralizes company news, tutor handbooks, class information, and Q&A resources in one easy-to-access location. Tutors can navigate the portal anytime, allowing them to quickly get up to speed and prepare for their first class. This hub also boosts Purple Ruler's operational efficiency by reducing manual communication with tutors by almost 85%.

In addition to creative in-class tools like polls, whiteboards, and breakout rooms, Purple Ruler tutors can monitor student progress and plan targeted sessions within Lark Base, where tutors can generate performance dashboards for individual students. Using the dashboards, tutors can track student attendance and performance improvement over time, and identify potential downturns. This empowers tutors with insights to provide better support and improve student outcomes with a target.

Student support is within easy reach

Effective student engagement requires more than just a virtual classroom and score cards. Behind-the-scenes efforts to prepare and motivate students are just as crucial to the success of a class. At Purple Ruler, the team uses Lark to streamline all communication between students, parents, and tutors.

In addition to a dedicated student portal centralizing class materials, submissions, and guidelines, the operations team further enhances student support by creating dedicated group chats for each student on Lark. These group chats connect tutors, class managers, parents, and students, facilitating discussions and keeping everyone in sync. The chats also serve as a gateway for students to quickly access study materials, with online documents and performance tracking pinned as tabs in the chat.

In conclusion, Lark empowers Purple Ruler with a streamlined solution for remote learning, where the company can consistently provide high-quality student support and class management, and elevate teaching quality with improved operational efficiency.