What Can Academic Support Teams Do With More Time Back?

Making Tutoring Simpler for Students—and Staff

Pima Community College’s Learning Centers provide free tutoring to students across the district, supported by in-house employees and a mix of in-person and virtual services. Operating tutoring at that scale requires more than connecting students with tutors. Students need a simple way to access support, staff need reliable information about tutoring activity, and leaders need visibility across multiple locations. Pima had used several systems over the years, but as its tutoring operation evolved, the team wanted a solution more focused on the core needs of academic support. 

With Kuali Reach, Pima found a simpler student experience and a more efficient way to manage the work happening behind the scenes.

The Challenge

Before Reach, accessing tutoring could be unnecessarily complicated. Previous systems required students to navigate multiple steps to schedule support, sometimes leading them to give up and call staff to make appointments for them.

Behind the scenes, tracking tutoring could be even more cumbersome. Some locations relied on handwritten logs that staff manually tallied and transferred into spreadsheets. Managers then had to compile that information into reports and charts. Across multiple campuses, reporting was also inconsistent. Different locations had different capacity for collecting data, leaving Pima’s director to bring several versions of the information together for college-wide reporting. Pima needed a simpler experience for students and a more efficient, consistent way to understand what was happening across its learning centers.

The Turning Point

With Kuali Reach, Pima simplified both sides of the tutoring experience.

Students can more easily schedule tutoring themselves, reducing the need to call staff for help navigating the process. For drop-in tutoring, the experience remains straightforward while visits are captured digitally instead of relying on paper records.

For staff, that shift has eliminated significant manual work. Rather than tallying paper logs and building spreadsheets, teams can use Reach dashboards, heat maps, and downloadable data to understand tutoring activity and demand. Leaders can also access information across locations without having to collect and reconcile separate reports from each campus.

That visibility helps Pima make more informed staffing decisions. Learning centers can see when students are using tutoring most and adjust schedules accordingly—for example, determining when three tutors may be unnecessary and one can comfortably meet demand. The data has also influenced hiring, encouraging some locations to prioritize tutors who can support multiple subjects.

Reach also gives Pima greater continuity across campuses. When needed, staff can review a student’s previous tutoring interactions across locations, helping them better understand past support and respond to individual circumstances without relying on back-and-forth emails or phone calls. Most importantly, the time saved has created capacity for other priorities. Pima is able to put more attention toward expanding programming, developing workshops, conducting outreach, strengthening tutor training, and building the skills of support staff.

The Results

Kuali Reach has helped Pima simplify tutoring operations while giving students and staff a more connected experience across its learning centers.

The college has:

• Made tutoring easier for students to navigate, allowing more students to self-schedule without relying on staff.
• Reduced manual reporting, replacing paper logs, weekly tallies, and spreadsheet-heavy processes with accessible tutoring data.
• Improved visibility across campuses, giving leadership a more consistent view of tutoring activity.
• Made staffing more data-informed, using utilization data to better align tutor coverage with demand.
• Created more capacity for student-focused work, including workshops, outreach, tutor development, and staff training.

For Pima, the biggest impact of greater efficiency is what the team can do with the time it gets back. Instead of spending as much time compiling and reconciling tutoring data, staff can focus more attention on improving programs and supporting students.

The result is more than a more efficient way to manage tutoring—it’s more capacity to strengthen the support students receive.

Spend Less Time Managing Tutoring—and More Time Improving It

Academic support teams have limited time and resources. When too much of that time goes toward scheduling, compiling spreadsheets, or reconciling reports, there is less capacity for the work that moves programs forward.

Pima Community College has used Kuali Reach to simplify those operational demands while making tutoring easier for students to access. The time saved can go back into the work that matters: developing tutors, expanding programming, reaching more students, and continually improving academic support.