I’ve been using Cambly for about 5 months or so now and while I think the idea behind their services and the opportunity as a WAH I.C. is fantastic, unfortunately the website falls short in many areas. For one, they do not have an tutor tutorials, or guides, or rubrics that a person can use once signed up, so essentially the ‘tutor’ will have to wing it. But on the other hand, the owners of Cambly do not want you to simply wing it, they want you to follow a set of rules they have for tutors except the problem is: the rules don’t exist on their website anywhere.
So let’s say you’re on shift, or just sitting around with the Cambly website open. A student looking for tutoring pops up on the dash board. You go to click it, and the video cameras for you and the other student pop up. From there you begin an awkward staring contest where the questions “How are you?” “Good, you?” get passed back and forth a few dozen times. You attempt to step the conversation up by talking about other things, about where they live, or their name, or how old they are, how many pets they have (all the while hoping you don’t sound like an international stalker), etc. Unfortunately due to your student’s only knowing enough English to say “Hi” and “How are you?”, these new questions are met with confusion and a lot of “What? I don’t understand.” From here you attempt to awkwardly find other words or ways to show what you mean, but honestly it’s futile battle and without any prior teaching experience or knowing the first language of the student.
Cambly doesn’t like this, doesn’t like when student hang up on you because they get frustrated and leave. And who could blame them? As a business owner myself, I wouldn’t like my customers hanging up and not fully using the service. But is this entirely the tutor’s fault? Google Cambly and you will find very few reviews or websites outside of the actual site itself talking about Cambly. Very few of those posts have positive things to say, and while I thought I might be one of the few to keep only positive comments in my blog, after an e-mail battle with one of the owner’s earlier this morning I can’t keep that positive feeling going.
Cambly has a great idea; pair up students of a language with a native speaking in that language. Because both the owners apparently learned second or third languages while traveling in those countries so they want to bring that experience to others who aren’t traveling. But what Cambly has brought to the table doesn’t work on a social level: when I’m traveling in Paris or Tokyo or somewhere out of country, and I learn new words from native speakers, it’s because I had a pretense to talk to those said speakers. I was in a restaurant and I needed help ordering, or I was walking on the street and was lost, or I met someone at an event or park and we hit off personally first. The point is: Cambly doesn’t have a pretense for pairing a tutor and a student up, and without that pretense the process of chatting is awkward and difficult for both parties. It is no wonder the student’s hang up after nervously laughing; it’s nearly impossible for some of them to be comfortable with a complete stranger asking them personal questions like their age and city of origin.
So my proposal to Cambly (even though they have been rude to me and don’t deserve this insight) is this: you need to have rubrics for each type of pretense. Brainstorm and think of all the reasons a traveler will talk to a native in that country and write them down. Then create lesson plans for each subject. They can be less school and teacher based and more native and loosely structured, but at the very least let there be some structure. Because without it, the website is Chaos, and it’s difficult to keep a student talking long enough to make any money.
So Cambly, I hope you reconsider the direction of your app as it doesn’t seem to be growing or taking the way you wanted. And you know what they say, a business that isn’t growing, is dying.
Good Luck, but I’m off that boat!
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