What to Do When a Student is Late (or doesn’t show up at all)

Sometimes when you connect to your session the student might still be offline (red dot in top right corner next to OFFLINE). This could mean that he/she is running late, having connection issues, or may miss the session completely.

While you are waiting for the student there are a few things you can do to try to test for connection issues and also remind the student to get to the session.

Follow these steps in this situation:

1. Wait one minute before doing anything, the student might just be running late.

2. At minute 1:00, use the ‘SEND A REMINDER’ button in the top right corner to send the student an email reminder. You can add a personal message if you’d like.

3. Immediately after, send a quick note in the chat to see if the student is possibly having connection issues ‘Hey NAME, are you trying to connect?’ (This might be the case sometimes if a student is connecting from a device rather than a computer).

4. As trivial as it sounds, just wait. Students will tend to show up once they get the reminder email. You don’t have to spend your waiting time staring at the black screen, but just keep your volume on so you can hear them if they arrive. Refresh your page every once in a while just to make sure there are no connection issues.

5. If they do arrive late, it’s up to you whether you want to finish the session at the scheduled time (totally okay if you have another session/commitment) or if you have some extra time, you can add a few minutes to the session.

6. If the student doesn’t come at all: Wait the full 30 minutes. Then complete the feedback form with for ‘attended’ and add a short message in the ‘other comments’ section such as “Sorry we missed each other today! Hopefully we can plan another lesson sometime soon!”

Remember that you will be paid for the session anyway.