In this training, we’ll provide you with an overview of the Biology Session flows and some best practices to keep in mind for these sessions.

Let’s start with the types of questions that students may (and will) post. Through our review of Biology questions that students already submit and in speaking with Biology subject matter experts, we see that there are really two types of questions that students may ask you.

We’ll need to make sure that we’re prepared to successfully take both types of questions and provide a great session experience for all students.

Session Phases

Generally speaking, the same session phases that we use in PhotoStudy will be the structure of these Biology sessions going forward. In order to accommodate the question types outlined above, we’ll make some slight adjustments.

Sessions will be capped at 20 minutes, but we anticipate that each session lasts approximately 10-15 minutes. 

Best practices for conducting sessions

We know that we’ll learn a lot as we conduct more sessions with real students. For now, here’s a handy guide with some Best Practices to help you deliver great sessions! (Sample messages you can use are in PURPLE – when copying and pasting, be sure to remove the bullet points.)

Some final reminders and guidelines…

When you believe an image or diagram or drawing can enhance your explanation of the concept or the problem, you have a few options.

• Use the workspace drawing tools to create and send the drawing to the student
• Use another drawing tool or application (perhaps Google Drawings), take a screenshot of your drawing and upload it to the student in the session
• Find an image from the internet search, download it and upload it into the session to send to the student.

When using an image from the internet be sure to give the location of the image proper attribution. Also, use images that are not text-heavy – remember you are the one that should be authoring the messages and not using an image to send text. Here are some examples:

Correct Use → Simple diagram, easily viewable on a student’s mobile device

Message to Student:

Here’s a quick diagram I got from an online search on Pinterest that shows the major components of cellular respiration. Let me explain what is going on here.

Incorrect Use → Image is all text, the student should not have to READ the image.

Resources

We’ve compiled a few resources to help you brush up on the typical Biology questions we anticipate seeing. The concept descriptions found below will also be accessible for you in the Expert workspace → Reusable content.

• Taxonomy of All Biology Concepts
• High School Biology – Concept Descriptions
• AP BIOLOGY – Concept Descriptions

We’re getting close to the time we start to take live BIO sessions with real students! Hopefully, you’ve had the chance to review the Session Phases/Best Practices doc.

In this final training document, we’ll review the process you should use for Claiming, Skipping, and Flagging sessions, as well as the process of using the current workspace to conduct these sessions.

Let’s dive into some of the details…

When the time comes for you to start your shift and begin claiming sessions, please log in with your normal Expert account. We’ll make sure you are certified on the platform and will be receiving Bio sessions.

As this is a new subject, we anticipate problem volume to be fairly low at the beginning. We expect that as more students know about Biology support, we will see Biology session volume around the same levels as Chemistry and Physics.

Claiming sessions…

As Biology is a new subject, we need to CLAIM AS MANY SESSIONS AS POSSIBLE! This will help us learn about what students are asking and refine our training, resources, and product accordingly.

When a legitimate Biology question is posted, you should BID whatever credits you believe are appropriate.

You should only use SKIP/FLAG for the following reasons:

SKIP

• If you do not know the concept of the problem
• If you are uncomfortable providing an explanation in 20 minutes

FLAG

• If the problem description AND the image are both ‘nonsense’ or spam → Essentially if the problem is not academic in nature
• If the problem is not in English
• If the problem is clearly not related to Biology → math-related or other science problems

Essentially, you should claim every legitimate Biology problem that you are comfortable with!

Working within the workspace…

We’re going to conduct these sessions with the current version of the workspace. That means you’ll need to adapt the BIOLOGY session phases to the phased structure of the current workspace. Here’s how that will work!

Current PhotoStudy Phases	BIOLOGY SESSION PHASES
Concept	PHASE 1: Greeting & Overview of Concept
Step-by-Step	PHASE 2: Deeper Explanation of Concept OR PHASE 2a: Explanation of ‘problem’
Solution	PHASE 2b: Final solution of ‘problem’
Discussion	PHASE 3: Summary & Additional Q&A

Please do your best to transition through the workspace session phases using this structure outlined in this table.

If at any time you need to upload any images, please do so using the + image upload button.

Final reminders…

Students will know this is new and that their experience will be slightly different from other PhotoStudy subjects. It’s ok if you make some minor errors along the way. 

That said, the operations team at Got It will be reviewing every session, in addition to your claim/skip/flag metrics, to ensure that we’re providing the best experience possible at this early stage. Our review of sessions will inevitably result in us providing more training or direction or reminders to all Experts. So please stay tuned for frequent updates along the way!

We’re confident that you’ll give it your best and lead the way with this new subject!

Please access the link below to begin the Biology subject test.

START THE TEST