COVID-19 & Education

As the UK Corovirus outbreak continues to get worse, I can see within my job role the number of people who are choosing to work from home or isolate continues to grow. This presents a unique opportunity for risual. As Teams is a relatively new part of Microsoft technology, there are a number of clients that have employees that either don’t understand how to use it, or rather they don’t know how to use it to help them in their job role.

We’ve been able to provide commercial training showing tips and tricks from how we use it at risual. Additionally, as part of risual Education, we offer apprenticeships in several qualifications which involved face to face visits, sometimes with apprentices in the NHS. As you might expect, the NHS has stopped allowing visitors relatively quickly in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. As part of my role in apprenticeships, I’m expected to conduct a formal review with apprentices at least every twelve weeks, however more frequent visits provide better support, and this presented a problem – how can I attend formal reviews with learners if I cannot visit them face to face?

To solve this problem, I called several my learners and spoke to them and their IT departments where appropriate to help them install and configure Microsoft Teams. I then simply sent out an Outlook calendar invitation and once the learners joined the meeting, I was able to share my screen and go through visit documentation as normal. The learner was able to sign the document remotely through Microsoft Word.

This also had the advantage that when I was noting employer feedback, the employer could see me writing it which would mean it would match their thoughts exactly, as sometimes what you say and what you write can be different and lead to confusion.

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