Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Philippines Opens Call Center to Connect Teachers to Struggling Students
As any parent with a child doing distance learning knows, the challenges to learning on an online platform from home are many. Some children simply don’t focus well outside of a classroom, and distractions abound in households with parents teleworking, and other siblings doing virtual work. In other cases, families may not be tech-savvy, or may lack the technology and connectivity required to do virtual work altogether. Teachers have found themselves wearing more hats than usual, often becoming not only teacher, but counselor, truant officer and IT specialist.
In the Philippines, some teachers have harnessed the country’s strong call center tradition – more than one million Filipinos are employed in business process outsourcing -- to help struggling students. Reuters is reporting that a local authority in the Philippines has set up a makeshift call center that is staffed by dozens of teachers to provide extra help to students struggling to keep up with virtual learning. The temporary call center, which opened in Manila last week, is staffed by 70 people who have been busy answering hundreds of daily queries by phone, email and instant messenger, as students get to grips with virtual learning. The teachers were schooled in the specifics of the technologies they’re using by call center supervisors.
Schools in the Philippines have been closed since March in an effort to contain outbreaks of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has stated that he will not reopen schools until a COVID-19 vaccine is available.
“Quality education must continue. Just because there is an ongoing pandemic the quality of learning shouldn’t suffer,” said Ferdinand Delgado, team leader of the support program. “This program was made to strengthen the government’s efforts to help students with their education.”
The most common queries to the new call center are reportedly related to math and science.
“This program is very important for the students because they cannot always easily reach out to their schoolteachers,” math teacher Ailene Almoite told Reuters (News - Alert). “More often than not, parents are also unsure about the lessons given to the students and are unable to help them.”
Edited by Maurice Nagle