Over a month ago, when it became clear that our normal daily routines would be dramatically altered by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, we knew that the operations of schools would also be significantly transformed. Despite closures not being formally announced, with a range of differing statements being delivered at a state and federal level, we made the decision to pivot our product roadmap to ensure that we would be in the best possible position to support remote teaching and learning.

As always we were guided by school communities when determining these changes, particularly through the feedback and suggestions made during our remote teaching and learning webinars in March. We then identified a number of key enhancements designed to help school staff, students and their families with remote teaching and learning in Term 2.

From day one, parents and carers will be able to submit their child's completed school work on their behalf within our Learning Tasks module. This functionality can be enabled by checking the Allow Submission checkbox under Parents in the security settings grid when editing a Learning Task. We believe this will help parents and carers of students who are either too young or otherwise unable to use Compass to submit their own work online.

We have added the ability for schools to email parents and carers their login credentials from People Management within the platform. For schools that have not yet invited parents into the Compass platform, it will now be far easier and faster for parents to get connected, without staff needing to mail merge or physically post letters.

Over the coming weeks, we will be adding the ability to see which students (or parents) are logging into Compass and viewing their class pages. This enhancement is intended to help teachers keep their students engaged and on track with their remote learning. To this end we’re also currently exploring opportunities to facilitate real-time discussion and conversations between teachers and students on the Compass platform. Keep your eyes on the blog to find out more about these changes.

If you need any support with these enhancements, our Support team continue to be available by email, phone and live chat, offering the same high level of assistance.

If your school does not currently use Compass and you’d like to find out how you could benefit from our remote teaching and learning modules, please get in touch.