Fall Teacher Training will be Virtual Only

Fall Teacher Training will be Virtual Only

7/29/2021

 

With the rise of infection rates due to the COVID-19 delta variant, we will be transitioning all teacher training in August/September away from in-person events to remote/virtual sessions.  We will be happy to screen share with you, but won’t send a Common Goal Systems employee to your site. This will mostly affect new customers, as existing customers rarely need teacher training.

 

We make this decision reluctantly, as we strive to create high levels of customer satisfaction (and customers mostly prefer in-person to virtual training).  We feel it’s necessary to manage a number of risks:

  1. We don’t want our employees to get infected. The average trainer does 15 teacher training events each fall, often in cramped physical locations to accommodate all teachers in a building. We are uncomfortable asking our employees to undertake the risk of in-person meetings when good alternatives exist.

  2. Our staff presents a risk to customers too. If our employee becomes infected at a training, they could potentially expose other customers at subsequent in-person events.  We would not want to be superspreaders.

  3. The start of school is peak time for our customer service workload.  We regularly get 3x (triple) the help desk ticket volume, as compared to non-peak times.  Every fall we spend long hours working through the queue and strive to minimize the increase in response times.  It’s an “all hands on deck” exercise for us.  If we lost a number of staff due to illness, we would likely be unable to deliver acceptable service to our customers.

  4. Similarly, if we infected our customers, they would struggle with the startup of the school year.

 

We will reach out to all customers with in-person teacher training scheduled.  We want you to be aware of this policy change, be prepared for successful/productive virtual training, and have an opportunity to discuss the situation.


Since our staff won’t be travelling, we will likely have time to schedule additional virtual training sessions (as compared to in-person).  Feel free to ask, if you’d like.

 

We hope to restart in-person training, once infection rates fall again.  We are open to coming out later for in-person training.  We really want our customers well trained and happy with the software.

 

 

Thank You,

 

 

The Common Goal Team