How can businesses adapt and cope with the COVID-19 pandemic?
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https://www.mytutor.co.uk/
How can businesses adapt and cope with the COVID-19 pandemic?
News release / Resources
Agility and innovation are key for firms as Coronavirus impacts society and businesses worlwide. Governments around the world are enforcing lockdown in a bid to stop the spread of coronavirus. In major cities this is particularly challenging with families suddenly confined to small apartments for weeks on end.
The dramatic spread of COVID-19 / Coronavirus pandemic has disrupted massively lives, livelihoods, communities and special businesses worldwide. All stakeholders, especially global business, must urgently come together to minimize its impact on public health and limit its potential for further disruption to lives and economies around the world.
But the sum of many individual actions will not add up to a sufficient response. Only coordinated action by business, combined with global, multistakeholder cooperation – at exceptional scale and speed – can potentially mitigate the risk and impact of this unprecedented crisis.
Businesses across the globe are feeling the strain of COVID-19, as the virus impacts usual trade levels and lockdown measures have forced many firms to close their doors.
Some firms, however - particularly innovative online businesses - have been able to quickly re-structure their business models to adapt to the crisis and continue to deliver their goods and services to their customers.
James Grant, CEO of MyTutor - the UK's leading online tutoring service – describes how they created a free Online School in less than a week
MyTutor - the UK's leading online tutoring platform - are one such business who have adapted to the pressures placed on pupils and teachers in the UK by launching a free Online School which is packed with support. MyTutor saw the demand for online services increase, and responded by launching the Online School in less than a week in a bid to help support students working at home.
James Grant - Co-founder of MyTutor - discusses how the Online School came into fruition:
1. What made us decide to launch an Online School?
As the leading online tuition platform, we felt a responsibility to play a part in keeping students learning. Schools have a big challenge to move learning online and we wanted to be at the front line of support. This is why we invested in the project internally and kept it free for everyone to use.
2. Why now?
Once schools closed and exams were cancelled, we knew that the news would disproportionately impact students from low-income families. There is also a lot of pressure on parents to put in place the right structure for their children. We wanted to take some pressure off parents, schools and students and felt well placed to do so given our expertise in free-to-use online learning.
3. What did we want to achieve?
The idea was to recreate the school day online through large interactive group sessions, short explainer videos and written resources. Our tutors delivering the content are current university students, so offer a different and complementary perspective to school teachers. We're aiming for 20,000 students to use the online school by the end of May. We also wanted to test different types of content to see what's most useful for students.
4. How did we resource the project?
We set up a project team with support in content, marketing and product. We recruited our best tutors to be the pilot subject leads and worked with some of our partners to widen the distribution and spread the word. The project team have daily stand ups with clear ownership areas and we involve other areas of the team where additional expertise is required.
5. Did it impact any other projects?
We made sure to keep it scrappy by developing landing pages outside the main website, uploading videos to YouTube and using Zoom for the group sessions. Having a focused team on the project meant that no other projects were disrupted. Due to the early success and traction, we're now building it into the website and starting to involve the wider team.
About the Online School
The Online School platform offers daily live group tutorials on key topics and new resources are added every day. Current offerings provide GCSE module tutorials, with Key-Stage 3 and A-Level modules in development. Pre-recorded videos focussing on popular topics are also uploaded to MyTutor's YouTube channel regularly, across a wide range of subjects, but are currently centred around the core subjects: Maths, the three Sciences and English.
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