Your timezone, your scheduled lessons

We just rolled out a small feature that should make it easier to schedule lessons with your favorite tutors — no matter where you (or they!) are located. Now, when you go to schedule your lessons, you can easily schedule in your own timezone. You’ll notice in the lesson proposal below, the timezone is CDT for central time. Your tutor will likewise be able to schedule in his or her own timezone as well, making scheduling a lesson super simple.

We’ve automatically detected your timezone, but if for some reason it isn’t right, updating your timezone takes just a couple of  seconds on your My Account page. Being able to schedule in your own timezone should make it easy to quickly set up lessons with tutors in different timezones in the US and around the world. Let us know what you think!

Introducing Advanced Search on InstaEDU

A tutor who can help with economics and AP Spanish Literature. Someone who goes to Stanford, is online right now, and can get you ready for your biology exam tomorrow. Or, as seen above, a female tutor who can teach you computer science and shares your love of piano.

InstaEDU is now the first and only online tutoring service that offers a search engine so you can find the exact tutor you’re looking for. With InstaEDU’s new Advanced Search feature, you can easily tell us what qualities you want in your tutor, and we’ll show you a list of all of our tutors who meet your requirements. With almost 2,000 experienced tutors on InstaEDU, we’re confident that you can find a tutor who’s the perfect match for you.

Here’s what’s included in Advanced Search:

Subject[s]: Enter more than one subject you’re studying (e.g. calculus and chemistry) and we’ll find a tutor who’s an expert in both.
Online now: You can choose if you want to see all tutors who meet your criteria, or just those who are online at the moment you search.
Male or female: If you feel more comfortable working with a tutor of a specific gender, you can now specify that.
Profile keywords: This makes it easy to find tutors with a specific interest (e.g. piano), qualification (e.g. math olympiad), or affiliation (e.g. Stanford).

You can access Advanced Search on any subject page by clicking the “Advanced Search” button, or by clicking the “Find Tutors” button on our homepage.

As always, our goal is to make finding the tutor who can help you finish a problem set, edit an essay and ace your next exam as simple and seamless as possible. And having a teacher who shares your interests makes lessons that much more enjoyable – and in turn, more effective.

Let us know what you think!

Tutor profiles: Now with response info

When you need help with a tough problem, it’s natural to reach out to a few specific tutors who you think might be able to help (i.e. most InstaEDU tutors can tutor in high school algebra, for example, but for advanced college linear algebra, you may need to message a few tutors to find one who can help with your exact problem). If you’re in hurry and need to work with a tutor ASAP, we’ve added two numbers to tutor profiles that will make it easier to identify the most responsive tutors — the ones who’ll be able to jump online today to help you work through your assignment.

The first is Likelihood of Reply. This percentage is the likelihood that a tutor you send a message to will respond to you on InstaEDU. The higher the number, the more likely you’ll hear back from your tutor about your lesson.

The second is Expected Response Time. This metric gives you information on how quickly you can expect to hear back from your tutor. If you’re looking for help ASAP, look for a number like George’s, pictured above (<5 minutes!).

Looking at Likelihood of Reply and Expected Response when messaging tutors can help you make sure you message tutors who not only know their stuff, but are also available to work with you ASAP. If there’s other information you’d like to see on tutor profiles, let us know!