I am supposed to be tutoring someone at 6pm GMT for 15 minutes. I am on Skype but the learner hasn’t accepted my request yet. What should I put in my lesson report and will I get any points for this?
Thanks,
Anthony.
You can tick the “did not show” box on the report form but you may want to check if the learner is new. You can try contacting them on their wall to find out if they had any problems understanding how to join or work Skype. We generally give the new guys a little leeway until they have sorted out how to join conversations.
Ok, I wrote on his wall and asked if he was having problems.
I also tried to send a report with the ‘Member did not attend’ box ticked, but it gave me an error message saying ‘The conversation report should be sent after the conversation. The report was not sent.’
Anyway, I’ve tried everything now.
Thanks.
That’s fine. The one drawback to sending the “did not show” message is that now if you do decide to speak with him, the report can’t be re-used. You may sometimes want to delay sending it for a while in case you decide to speak to the learner at another time. One other thing is that if you have GMT selected as your time zone instead of British time you are out by an hour. It looks to me like you were an hour early for your conversation which may be why your learner wasn’t there and which is also why the system prevented you from sending the report. British summer time is actually GMT +1.
I have now been contacted by your student who says you did not call him for the conversation thirty minutes ago when it was scheduled. I will tell him that you will try calling him now or arrange another time. You can explain the confusion. 
I often have problems with new members who have set their time zone wrong. I find the simplest, given that I don’t know how good their English is, is to send a “member did not attend” report. When they contact me saying “Ah, I figured out what I did wrong” I offer to reschedule the lesson. Yes, the report can’t now be used, but I can e-mail them their comments and they can import the comments as a lesson.
The alternative is to cancel the lesson after the lesson time - but it’s harder to explain to a new student why you did that and what they should do next.