I would love to have a better system to handle tutor shift coverages. As it is, it is a logistical nightmare of emails sent to the wrong people, or no emails sent at all, and tutors just not showing up.

I’d like tutors to be able to be able to give up a DIT shift by posting it on COLT. They would post the date, day of the week, subject, and time of the shift they cannot make.

It would be great if tutors could go to a single COLT webpage a see a list of all available opportunities for them to work. I made a mock up of what I have in mind: https://webspace.utexas.edu/shanic/Tutor%20Opportunities%20example.pdf

Opportunities could be arranged chronologically, and maybe events happening within the next 24 hours could be red.

For DIT and AT shifts, a tutor could just claim them on a first come first serve basis. So once a tutor claims a shift, it disappears (although maybe they should have an undo button if they make a mistake?). And there would need to be a way for Jay and I to know who is covering who’s shifts, so maybe an email could be sent to us, or a log could be generated that we could access.

For small group tutoring and other opportunities, a tutor could volunteer, and then we could go through the list of volunteers and select who we wanted and email them. For these things, we should be able to delete the post once we have enough volunteers.

Part B

Another issue we have in DIT is keeping track of tutor arrivals and departures. There are so many tutors coming and going, often we don’t know a tutor was late or didn’t show up until we do payroll. It would be great if COLT could somehow know which tutors were supposed to arrive when, and flag them if they log in late or log out early (10 minutes or more), or don’t show up at all, sending Jay and I an email letting us know right away so we can speak to the tutor in a timely manner. Even better, maybe automatic emails could be sent to the tutor, letting them know that we know they were late/absent and that we’re keeping track, and too many lates or absences is grounds for dismissal, or something similar that will scare them into good behavior. Another cool thing would be if late/absent info could automatically be put into the DIT Work History section that I requested before (as long as we could edit or delete it as necessary).

One thing that I thought of that might make this very difficult is that for this to work really well, COLT would need to know who is actually supposed to show up for a particular shift, and if a tutor is covering someone else’s shift, COLT would need to know that the regularly scheduled tutor shouldn’t be held responsible for a late or absence if another tutor claimed their shift. A further complication is if a tutor posts a shift ahead of time (like their supposed to) and no one takes their shift, they shouldn’t get in trouble for missing the shift since they followed all the procedures. But if a tutor posts a shift at the last minute, and no one takes their shift, they should still be dinged.

I know this is huge, but you would be solving a ginormous problem.

Thanks!!

This will prevent an error being triggered on the error log when a requested photo is not found.

This corrects tutor counts for future semesters