 Hi, I'm Fiona Gomez. I'm the academic director at Cork English College. Fiona, I'm going to start by asking you about the challenges that the pandemic has posed in your school or in your classrooms there and what was that like? So a lot of like everybody across the world has been a lot of challenges. I think the challenges have changed a lot also over the past seven, eight months. Initially back in March, the biggest challenge was having hours to get everything online and the school wasn't ready at all for a digitalized world in an online world. So it was a scramble and very stressful. Then we had the challenge of coming offline and going back to face-to-face and that was that was scary for everybody. It was scary for the staff. It was scary for the students. They didn't know what to expect and the the lead up it was like it's like the lead up to Christmas when your kid put in a negative way. There was always anticipation you don't know what to expect but it wasn't a good feeling. When you're a kid it was it was a good feeling. But everything worked out fine once you went back to face-to-face everything went really smoothly and because we had set up systems and structures over the previous months it was easy to then have a digitalized classroom but then we had to go back into lockdown. So telling that I think the biggest challenge in lockdown too is that the students were upset. They were really getting back into the face-to-face classes and they've been listening to the news and when I was walking into the classrooms to tell them what was coming down the pipeline I literally got oh no when I walked into the classroom because they want to be face-to-face but they knew it was coming again so that was a challenge dealing with everyone's emotions I think. How have you at an organization and yourself and your role responded to those challenges and those developing challenges? So I think one of the biggest things we've done here that the students appreciate is a lot of communication. So every week I email all the students to see how they're doing and I send them a questionnaire that's anonymous if they want it to be if they want to follow up they can add their email and just asking them for the good the bad and the ugly and it's really time consuming but it's really nice because the students feel like they have that outlet. I had a conversation with a student this week who she just wanted to talk. She knew that classes have to be online right now but she felt a bit lonely because she missed the social interaction she just moved from Angola and left her husband to Angola so she was on her own and lonely and she just wanted that one to one so I think that communication with students has been really important and especially to keep their loyalty to the school and the teachers have been really on it with the students as well but the students really like there's been so much so much more back and forth communication with the teachers and the students and there had been in the past and so that access has been really helpful for students. And in terms of the the feedback and the both from the staff and from the students in the areas of the academic approach the health and safety issues and then the general welfare which I think you're kind of pointed to there what were the things that they told you which informed how you developed the plan? So before we even opened back up we sent all the students a survey and this was questions about every possibility that we could do when we opened back up just to see what they thought we did the same with the staff and the teachers and host families so we had a lot of data from everybody about what they were willing and not willing to do and we knew what we wanted to do but we just wanted to make sure that the students wanted the same thing and we wanted everybody's social distance and wearing masks in the school for everybody's safety and that's what the students wanted as well so the fact that we were all in line there was really helpful and also with the weekly emails that I sent and questionnaires that I've been sending to the students in week one that was a special week one of reopening it was a specialized questionnaire and asked what they appreciated about being back to school and they all pointed to safety and I think that's everybody's concern these days so it really helped us develop a structure and we were nervous that the one-way system would work and social distancing wouldn't work but all the students followed the new rules from day one and were happy to do so so it's been really positive One of the things that has been mentioned a lot is this sense of the idea of community both a school community and the students being members of the wider community there where you are in Cork or wherever they might be is that something that you have found to be a significant factor? Yeah I can actually share a photo of some community and I'll talk through this it definitely has we really want the students to feel happy in class so we had a social program that was face-to-face and really helped students love but obviously that helped to move online this picture here is the first day back the first Friday of the first week back in school we just get everybody some chocolate with Cork written on it that nobody could eat in the school because they had their masks on but again this is the smiling who can read their eyes but here we have social programs in the school that we do in the afternoons so it's an online social program sometimes it's a coffee and a chat sometimes it's playing Super Mario Kart sometimes it is a virtual tourist park so that sense of community is definitely important for the students but they still get to see people and communicate with people in a later setting because we have there is that element that was missing when we were face-to-face because we didn't want students hanging around the school too much our common room wasn't available after classes so that element of community was lost but we were able to maintain it with an online version and then apart from the ability to use Zoom and those other kind of tools what would you say you've learned from these challenges and trying to kind of tackle them and come up with solutions for them that is going to stand to you you know I think everyone was so nervous about teaching on Zoom a few months ago because nobody had really done it there was something that was really really new to everybody and the unknown it is something that's always very fracking and I think the way we approached it that like unknown world we're going to be online I don't know what that's going to mean everybody was nervous so communication with the students in a nervous way communicating with the teachers now being able to give them all the information that they wanted and needed compared to now we know where we stand so when you know luckily our numbers are going up so I'm getting you know being able to bring more teachers back to work and the difference in March when it was like here's Zoom here's digital things good luck to here's Zoom it's easy all you need to do is this and here's the digital work and it's you know it's a different mindset and it's a different way of communicating and it just it makes everything feel so much easier and everybody is is that much more at ease because of it and everybody's happy to help each other out more and it's just a much it's a much calmer going from like being up here with wound up to just being calm and everything's working wonderfully that's what I'm doing kind of we've survived that so anything else is you know nothing in comparison exactly the last question then I have for you is how do you see the situation developing in the kind of medium to long term and that would be like things that will stay with us things that might go back to where they were beforehand or new things that might come come our way so I think digital is all staying here it's not going anywhere so we're still going to have student classes we're still going to have digital course books I think for the next few months we're going to be going on to an opening and closing roller coaster I don't think that's going anywhere for a while either but I think we've all learned a whole new skill set on digital learning and digital teaching which is really helpful so even though all of these things are going to stay with us we'll have the ability to do more things and feel able to offer different types of classes and what do you think when students are choosing a school now what is the what are the factors in their mind that might have been different might be different to what was there before well I think I mean it's a factor it's a weird one because you know obviously the total immersion issue has always been a selling point for schools being able to come to the country and live and study here but it's also made it impossible for a group of students to be able to come because of maybe visa problems or monetary problems so on the one hand we do have the ability to offer online classes anybody anywhere in the world it's also a problem because there's obviously more competition for that but also the feedback I think that we're getting from students about how everything is going now and that online is good and face to face is good it's helpful for new students and returning students to know that regardless of the situation they're going to be able to get a good quality in your course from it