 My name is Robert Hanley. I'm the Quality Manager of Atlantic Language based in Galway. Robert, I want to start by asking you what challenges has the pandemic posed in your school? It posed plenty of challenges and I can go into that in a bit of detail now. Maybe just by prefacing remarks, I went about just gathering some input from our team on this procedure. I put out the questions to the group and just going to compile things in. I'll show you a couple of slides with testimony and feedback from our staff and I'll add some comments and context to that then I can as well. So in terms of the challenges, I'm not sharing my screen yet. That's the first challenge, bigger than Zoom. Yeah, I think everybody had to do that course. That should be visible now? Yeah. Yeah, so in terms of the challenges, there are some examples there when I put that question to the team, things they've commented on and you can see it kind of breaks down. The single biggest one I think is the uncertainty. The uncertainty, like the changing status of the school, with short notice, you're closed. Again, with fairly short notice, you're reopened and with a fairly short notice, you're closed again and you can't predict how the pandemic is going to go. But that's obviously the biggest challenge and that has an awful lot of repercussion, knock-on effects then as well. The uncertainty created by that. A couple of other challenges, like you know exactly where we fit in, the English language sector. We don't always know where we belong in terms of guidelines and the structure of the government. Sometimes we're in with further education and the colleges and maybe the instructions that come out in terms of how we operate aren't necessarily tailored to language tools and how we try to keep businesses going and keep businesses alive. And trying to find what's best for us, what's best for our students is a challenge in there as well. And the best practices, if you're going online, how you can do that is a challenge as well. And another big challenge then, like in some of the comments in green, kind of support that is just the disruption to the business, which is a huge catastrophic really. The entire language travel stream just cut off in one go, academic year, junior courses, training courses. And that of course leads to the unavoidable loss of staff, of loads of good staff, good teachers, people you're just not able to keep working. It's a huge challenge to try to keep the business operating, keep people working as much as possible. And even looking to the future, having people still there, whether we're able to keep working throughout this period, or had to be like go and come back, that challenge that you come back with just a stronger team is still a looming one. And because ultimately we've lost a high season, probably introducing a second high season with the spring next year as well. And then that has a spiriting effect on morale as well. It's hard to, with all just working remotely in the process, you lose that ability to check up on students, on staff, see how everyone's doing. And then the other challenge I think in some of the comments of lack there point to that just the logistics. If you move to online, if you do it very quickly without much running time, there's a lot of logistical challenges to that for students and for staff, trying to turn that into something sustainable that brings in revenue to keep the business going, looking for specific programs looking to deliver a form of online tuition for the general students, but also for specific partners to keep revenue going. That is a huge challenge in itself. You're trying to sell something while you're building it, while you're training, while you're also leading talented and qualified people. So that in itself is a challenge. And then not to mention the reopening and the logistical challenges and the housekeeping challenges of that as well, and finding a good way to keep the product going and try and get back to the old Atlantic was the challenge for the period when we were reopening. You know, teaching through the advisors and that presents a unique challenge in itself as well. And how would you say you and your team have responded to those challenges. I did mention some of the specifics of classroom challenges as well. Like, you can see some more feedback here from, from staff on how students have found it, you know, getting into the student were outside as well. So the ways we respond to these, you know, you have to be very reactive. It's the position we're in. And, you know, you can see some of those challenges are just simple things like teaching students online if they don't have a very good internet connection. The same thing with staff preparing hardware for and then acquiring a whole new methodology we have doing business. So the ways we try and respond to it. One is the big one and you have to try and almost compensate for all that in face to face communication that that's lost, you know, and you try and get meetings online, you try and have support sessions, information sessions, Q&A sessions for students online as well. You try and have a check-in system, you use the accommodation, the business to check-in and students who are still in the accommodation. You try and have one to one where possible as well. So just compensating as much as possible communication. You know, keeping that communication going there with teachers is something as well, something we've tried to do. And hopefully we can do more with the likes of ELT Ireland as well and support groups to keep that communication going too because of that uncertainty about people's job prospects. Then like obviously the points in green there, there's a big adaptation on the teaching side. It's learned a whole new scale, it's tried to transfer teaching ability online. That's not done with the click of your fingers, that that's quite challenging and it's learning on the job. The people are often ready experiences as well in the process, but it's incumbent on teachers there and I can say ours has done really well with it, it just learned that whole new skills quite quickly and under pressure. And that comes from the other point I'd make there is just being as agile as possible. With fairly agile management, I think in terms of we were online within a week, I think of the first closure and then setting up a virtual learning environment shortly after that. So that agility, something we've obviously got better at throughout the year and it was really necessary now in hindsight to be able to operate quickly like that to set up things quickly to train up people to learn while working as well in order to set up new streams and start doing some of our tuition, some of our programs online. One of the points there is about keeping morale high. Can you tell us something more about that and how that was experienced for staff. It's a challenge because I mentioned in the process you almost forget that everyone's learning to work remotely as well. And that tends to, of us team are working from home as well so you lose that just the physical staff room, all that that brings with it, the chance to share a space, you have a more honest conversation face to face than you will in a kind of minute or two Zoom meeting. So that's the challenge to keep up the morale and you have to try and get creative and find ways to keep people in touch, you know, with their texting or meeting up like you're having groups or, you know, extending meetings beyond the necessary into maybe a chance for a bit more of a chat. Not to forget people are isolated at home and working from bedroom, kitchen, spare rooms as well. So they're trying to keep tabs, I think is vital. And then all you can do, particularly for the teachers who have to learn so much so quickly is just give them the resource, give them the training that they need to allow them to be able to do their job in this new reality as well as they can. All you can do is put it in front of them and you know competence then breeze breeze morale I think and then it just becomes it goes back to that first point I mentioned just just keeping tabs on people checking in people are okay. And how has the, how has feedback from either the staff or the students can informed your response. As you went along. I'll move on here. A couple of examples of our online classes there. There's a couple of visuals there. Maybe to go through some of the feedback for as we've received it first like this is some sample of student feedback because you know my own role that the team role at large will be to look at that feedback and try and extract by practice from it as much as we can. So you can see some student feedback here. You know, the teachers say like students, they do feel the pressure that you can see it ourselves in the communication students maybe will have a little bit less patients perhaps to wait for something might be a little bit more demanding but that comes with more written communication. You lose that face to face. So we do, we have asked for more patients from students but also tried to double up and just communicate with them as well as possible and try and not always rely on just emails and give them a bit of context. We do see that students, interestingly, we're happier in the virtual setup than they were in the socially distanced classroom for feedback show that they're quite critical actually and exacting but as you expected them to be once we reopened on how that and they missed the the old relaxed way of the classroom. It wasn't the same what happened with students in the socially distanced. We found that once students settled in and we were able to train them to quit them to do classes online they actually preferred the online. And we also found that like, we, by keeping in touch we were able to maybe get students to continue their bookings to keep their, to keep their studies going as much as possible and transferring them online so that was one of the things we tried to do too. You can see some of the student direct feedback I've copied in there and read a couple of interesting points in it you know and just about exacting communication I've talked about what students are asking us to do and it's important for us to keep tabs on that. Interesting like they're hiring better teachers the same teachers. There must be there must be some positive feedback in there somewhere for hiring new people and we did interesting student feedback that we should reopen the bar. I didn't know we had a bar. It's there. It's well hidden in the student feedback. It is interesting. You know there's a staff feedback then as well. A couple of things I would take from that like when we asked for staff or feedback on the process. You know the communication point is everything, even though it's uncertain I think on certain communication is probably better than communication at all that's one thing we've learned. We've tried to find other creative ways to support and replace all that the common scenario was being in the same building. You have to do much more training and development for staff than you normally would particularly when it comes to teaching but other departments do like registrations and so forth. There's a whole there's a whole new field of training is needed. We try and bring that on and developing house training and power people to lead the way and take on training as well and then entering and joining you know teacher training group teacher interest groups and try to do team building activities as much as we can as well. Some of the ways we'll try to react. And apart from how to use zoom and all of that. What else would you say you've learned along the way as an organization or as professionals. I've got that question to the team as well. These are the some of the responses they got back. You can see kind of go from macro to micro there. Like the logistics, you can simplify what I'd say like learning to teach online, but that's transference as well as learning new digital competences using virtual classroom using the virtual learning environment, preparing for specific programs that they call for a slightly new technology. If we're able to bring in a new stream of business by teaching online. The onus is on everyone to scale up really really quickly on that so everyone has to a new skills in that. And it's, it can range from quite simple mechanical stuff to getting into things like inclusion and making sure students are communicating students aren't always the keyness to leave on a camera or to participate in the class or to have a proper kind of study atmosphere where they are so getting past that as well even into the making connections and relationships with students that that's a big challenge in terms of training and offscaling for teachers. Like another thing we've learned I would say when not very nice and I do when the colonists your hedge and move much quicker. We were able to move procedures online quicker than we would have done so in a different in a different universe without the pandemic. Things like testing level change testing, you know, students of the student services. You have to do it quickly and you have to kind of check later on for quality control and that you're doing it properly and everyone's doing the same way but the technology is there and the software is there and the willingness to learn we'd be glad to see is there as well. So some of these procedures online quite quickly. And when it goes back to a fully reopened school as possible I hope that's that's the skill set that's there. We're all more comfortable with them. More distance communication more online procedures more blended procedures around the communication of students but then in the classroom as well. And yeah, then the other main point like that we've taken from the business model needs to evolve a little bit, you know, we depending like the language travel industry is, you know, every few years there's another reason for there's another injection of volatility. And this time with the pandemic, but it numerous things can happen to that so it's critical I think in our context and maybe for the industry at large as well that we're able to react and not depending on on visa based programs and short stay groups that may be subject to disruption. You know, the pandemic this year came out of the blue but the world we live in now with travel so accessible and people make it so much that kind of thing can happen again or something else that we don't know about. So it's getting past that dependency on on on the stream courses of learning English and Ireland and try to move into more specific, maybe more sustainable models now that we've acquired a little bit of online competency and keep developing that competency, but also look for more alternate revenue streams outside of that as well because it's critical and simply learned that we have to be done. Absolutely. And then just to kind of round it up. Looking forward. How do you see the future in terms of what stays with us. What do we get back or what changes completely again. Once we're, once we're back to the status quo or something like it. Well, in the medium to long term. Yeah, it's very hard to predict. You know the, you can read a lot about the changing the changing workplace and and you know everything to really quickly react to working working from home working remotely team communication, becoming much more use getting familiar with cloud based stuff. You know file storage and things like that. That's all part of the new reality we're all able to do that now comfortable that now so that that changes things a bit. You know the disruption the commercial disruption to students traveling. There's no reason not to offer a digital component of that now. Why shouldn't students be able to do a few weeks sort of before before traveling to the country. Why shouldn't things like placement testing we don't online so that that you know as maybe it's just ingenious to say but it's the most modern in terms of technologically speaking of an industry either. Because accepted maybe, but we can use we can use the tools that are there a bit more so that the rate of progress there I think has been vastly accelerated. This uncertainty like the first point I made that that's not going anywhere. What we've taken from it is a more transparent way to communicate with all the stakeholders with students you know with staff. The agents remember those were just this honestly that transparency, even if you are communicating uncertainty it's still it's still communication and. Yeah, I think the pressure that one of the responses to the challenges has been top the game in terms of communication is still much more to be done but hopefully that's that's something everyone can take from it as well. You know, it was schools teachers staff students that everyone that that circle of communication is much further and more transparent for everybody involved with something I would hope to emerge in this as well as a positive aside from being very, very deeper and quick with the zoom buttons.