COVID-19, School Closures, and What We’re Doing About It: Your Questions Answered

Astounded. To say it’s been a crazy time over the past month would be a bit of an understatement. With the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world hasn’t seen a crisis of this magnitude since World War 2.

It’s also been a time of big change at Planck, as we figure out the ‘new normal’ and how we can best support our tutors, our students, and parents, in the midst of all this.

We know that the situation is causing all of us lots of anxiety, between school closures, losing jobs, and money pressures. That’s why we wanted to give you an update on what’s going on at Planck, what we’re doing to protect your work here, and what’s next.

1. Why did you shift to Online Lessons?

You might have seen that we’ve recently had a transition from offering “Personal Home Tutor” to “Online Lessons from Home”. We set this up for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, to address the elephant in the room—COVID-19 and the needs for social distancing. With the closure of schools in response to the coronavirus outbreak, you’ll probably be wondering how you’ll keep your children busy and keep their education on track. We believe online lessons are the way to give some much-needed extra learning support to students while schools are closed—and to the thousands of parents who are now staying at home and having to be much more hands-on with their children’s education. (While also going quietly mad…)

Secondly, as our business adaptation strategy to the new normal post-COVID-19. These new normals are included the way parent set up homeschooling for their children, make a plan, structure their lessons, and nurturing new culture and discipline at home.

We genuinely believe that personalised, one-to-one online lessons offer the best possible impact, value and experience. Our aim is that, through the continuous online lessons, students and parents and confident regarding their education is on track. For tutors, we believe this new normal also a huge opportunity for them to earn money for living while sharing their knowledge with students.

2. How did you select the tutors to be involved? And how can I register my interest?

We shift to Online Lessons approach within a week of hearing the news that schools would be closed. Unfortunately, at first, we are still lacking in tutor recruitment and now we believe the tutor recruitment and selection process should be commenced ASAP.

For the sake of feasibility, we chose a few tutors to take part, taking into account factors like the number of lessons delivered, parent reviews and overall performance (lesson flows and format) and lesson vibes.

Over the next few weeks and months, the demand for online tutoring will increase dramatically. If you’re keen to be involved, you can register your interest here by clicking the Sign-up button below.

3. Will the Online Lessons continue after schools open again?

Yes, absolutely. In the end, we will let the parents decide which approach is best for their children. However, as we mentioned above regarding a new normal post-COVID-19, we bet online lessons is the future in education. At this stage, we’re not 100% sure. There may not be so much need once schools are open again. Or, we may find this is the way it should be. We’re going to play it by ear, and we’ll let you know.

4. My lessons with the current student have been rescheduled to a totally different time and day from before. What if I can’t make it now?

With students now mostly staying at home, timetables have shifted around a bit, so, unfortunately, some student slots will have moved. We know that a lot of tutors have had lessons cancelled because of this. This happened and we work out so hard to ensure those tutors who lost their job/students will find a replacement for online tutoring soon.

5. Are you still recruiting new tutors?

Yes, definitely. We are running day and night to recruit more tutors to gauged demand. If you are interested to be part of this, do sign-up in tutor area and our team will reach you out.

We will keep updating this page…