A student logs on to TuLi.
When Michael Falchiere attended Quinnipiac University, he never went to any of the learning centers on the campus because he didn’t want to be judged for needing extra help.
His younger brother Andrew, a junior at the University of Maryland, won’t have to worry about that. Michael Falchiere, along with Tulane University alumnus Benjamin Kanter, created an app that connects college students to peer tutors on their respective campuses.
“The whole idea is that it’s not just tutoring, you are becoming a part of the school community,” Michael Falchiere said. “Any tutor can be a student as well, so you might be giving help to somebody and you might be receiving help from them in another subject, it’s really a sharing economy.”
TuLi, short for “Tutor Link,” is a mobile and Web app. It has launched at five college campuses so far and has campus ambassadors at each.
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Kanter pointed out there was not much help for students who are taking upper-level courses or when they study late into the night, Michael Falchiere said.
“[Students] are going to benefit from it a lot,” said Andrew Falchiere, an accounting major and one of four campus ambassadors for the app. “I know when I’m in [McKeldin Library] studying for a final, whether it’s the day before or the day of and I’m starting to freak out, if I know there is a thing like TuLi, where a tutor can come to me and help me out and explain some things I really don’t understand right before my test, it will be a lot better for me and my grades will improve.”
Gavri Schreiber, another campus ambassador at this university, said he is working on reaching out to organizations to find students to be tutors and to sign up for the service.
“Signing up to be a tutor is like, if I came up to you and said, ‘I have a job for you, there’s no training, you get to choose how much you get paid and you get to pick your own hours. … You don’t even have to work at all if you don’t want to, and you can decide where you want to work if you have an hour free and want to make 20 bucks,’” said Schreiber, a junior Chinese and philosophy major.
Students sign into TuLi with their university email and can either sign in to seek tutoring or apply to become a tutor, Michael Falchiere said.
“To be a tutor you need to be on your school’s Dean List, and you can only tutor in classes you have an ‘A’ or ‘A-‘ in, or if your school does ‘A+’ obviously,” Michael Falchiere said.
Tutors get to choose their price range and when they are available to tutor, he said.
“This is going to revitalize tutoring on college campuses; it’s bringing the [concept of] shared economy to a service that everyone needs to use in some regard,” Schreiber said. “Some people have been calling it the Uber of tutoring. … It’s going to change the way people look at tutoring.”
