Thanks for feedback. Just thinking out loud here. Maybe reliability should be a ratio so that even someone with just a few classes could be compared in relative terms with someone with many classes. Call this a reliability index.

Thanks for the great responses.

as Tetyana said, criticisms help us getting better, so we always welcome it.

But I would like to add one point to your comment of lower feedbacks for ‘rare’ languages.

You are right that a niche language as for example Vietnamese has less interested students then the more common languages as English, Spanish etc. But you also have to take into consideration that for the more popular languages there are also more teachers offering lessons, so on average there should not be a very significant difference in number of students per teacher.

There might be still some difference now, as we are still relatively small and growing fast, but we think it is very important to keep a balanced marketplace, with a ‘healthy’ratio of students/teacher in average.

This is what I have learned from my eBay experience:
Too much of one of the two is not good: too many students for a language means that teachers cannot properly teach all of them, too many teachers means they do not get sufficient students.

We aim to have in Myngle a healthy balance for each language.

Thank you for the comments, we like constructive criticism

Regarding your first point, actually ANY user can see the breakdown of the Myngle score into 3 components: paid lessons + free lesson - cancellations. But if you would like to see further details (say, dates of cancellations), then you can see this info only for your own profile.

You are absolutely right, Myngle score measures the “popularity” of a teacher, or as we say, his/her activity level (number of lessons) and reliability (cancellations). On the other hand, the feedback stars which we already had before measure teacher’s quality: you might have a teacher with Myngle score 100 (active) but with 4 stars (good level). So a teacher of a niche language can still stand out with 5 stars (excellent quality) although with a lower Myngle score (fewer lessons given).

We definitely have cool plans ahead as to how we’ll promote newly joining teachers. In fact, we are already doing quite a lot of babysitting and marketing support for newcomers, so the idea is that they get on track early enough with students. If you’d like to learn more and benefit yourself as a teacher, please feel free to contact me at tetyana@myngle.com.

Thank you and all the best myngling,
Tetyana

First this score doesn’t go to the question of reliability at all since all the numbers are lumped together. Someone on the outside has no idea if a score of 20 represents 20 completed lessons or 30 lessons with ten cancellations. Until you can track reliability independently I would suggest that you don’t imply this number tells us anything about a student or teacher’s reliability.

Second, from a business point a higher number is better, but a higher number should not, in and of itself imply anything about the quality of a teacher. If a teacher is teaching Vietnamese there are obviously a lot fewer learners available. The Myngle score is a measure of popularity and the base popularity of a given language will have a strong impact on this number.

Finally, while this creates an incentive for teachers to teach more classes (I want to move up a color band) it could have the negative consequence of dissuading other teachers to “join the game”. If the top teachers get a great deal of attention from this number (the store window effect) and it draws attention from new teachers this may have the unintended effect of discouraging new teachers. If you are going to scale to even greater heights you need to find a way so even the newest teacher can be recognized for his or her accomplishments without getting buried at the bottom of the pile.