In the summer term of 2021, after having some issues with YouTube Live chat, I started using Discord. My vision was that students could enter equations or share images of their working. It also meant that I had better safeguarding controls to reduce the risk of trolls causing a nuisance. Discord chat worked well, but it was not without its issues. A few times the app did not work, and requiring tutees to use Discord actually had the effect of reducing participation numbers.
At the end of the summer term 2022, to try to encourage more tutees to regularly attend, I decided to charge a nominal fee. The rationale was that someone is more likely to regularly participate in the tuition if they have invested in it financially. It’s easy to forget about something that is being offered for free, and put off using it until later, but if someone is paying out every month for something they might be more motivated to make good use of what they are paying for. My friends know how conflicted I was about charging money for my tuition sessions because I discussed it with them often, but the consensus was that I should charge (and could potentially charge much more if I chose to). I started using Patreon to handle the monthly payments, but insisted that anyone who could not afford the tuition only had to ask and I would make allowances so that they could still join in, as long as they did join in regularly. No one has ever asked me to make such allowances.
The problem now was that tutees had to be registered on Patreon and registered on Discord to participate live, then would watch the tutorial on YouTube Live whilst interacting on Discord and, this year, also interacting by using a digital whiteboard I could see being edited in real time. When participants cancelled their Patreon subscription, it would not inform me, so maintaining the Discord roles list became challenging. The Patreon bot that was supposed to do it all automatically simply did not work (and at one point went rogue and started removing everybody’s roles without rhyme or reason).
While I was redesigning my website (i.e. procrastinating from doing my marking) I noticed that it was possible to make certain blog posts that could only be seen to paying subscribers. I also noticed that it was possible to make parts of pages visible only to paying subscribers too. WordPress, who hosts my website, had some easy-to-use tools to make subscription work well. Users would not even have to make a WordPress account, they would receive an email with a link to the restricted content if they entered the email they used when they enrolled.
I decided to migrate the enrolment process over to WordPress, keeping all the tutee subscription fees the same. The migration process did not take long.
Now, I can do things like this: the content below can only be seen by people who have enrolled and subscribed via WordPress. Anyone who has not paid via WordPress will simply see a prompt to subscribe:
This message cannot be seen by you unless you log in.
(Sometimes you have to click Log in again after logging in, or at least that is what I have found while testing)
The move away from Discord and Patreon means I can share downloadable resources more easily via subscriber-only pages. If 35 tutees subscribe, I will be able to increase the WordPress plan so that I can store up to 13 GB of resources for tutees to access, and have more design customisation options. If 67 tutees subscribe, I will be able to increase the plan even further so that I can store up to 50 GB of resources, but also I will be able to embed the YouTube Live chat directly next to the live stream on my website, and use other WordPress plugins too. To be honest, I will probably increase the plan to that anyway at some point, but at the moment I simply do not have the money to do so.
So, on Thursday the tuition session will take place on YouTube Live, as usual, and use YouTube Live chat instead of Discord, so it is all in the same place. Tutees will also have the option to use the shared whiteboard. A link to my whiteboard (via OneNote) is on the enrolled tutees’ page, and the playlist of recorded sessions will be accessible there too in case any tutees miss any sessions. Only enrolled tutees will have access to these.
Please do let me know what you think about the new streamlined and integrated registration process and tuition sessions! Thank you for your continuing support
Physics with Keith 