In light of the Government’s restrictions to non-essential travel and contact due to COVID-19, people across the sector are adapting to working from home and planning for potential closures.

It's an unprecedented and uncertain situation, but working from home doesn’t have to impact teaching and learning. With OneFile, you can access the whole system online to create plans, set activities, provide feedback and even complete remote reviews – all from the safety of your own home.

Here are some tips to follow if you’re working from home:

Communication

If you’re working from home, it’s really important to stay in touch with your colleagues and learners – not just for productivity reasons, but to reduce isolation too!

With OneFile, you can communicate within the software via instant messaging, feedback submissions and video chat. It’s a great way to meet your colleagues face to face for morning meetings and catch ups. Remember, it’s ‘social distancing’, not social disconnecting, so make sure you stay in touch when you’re working from home.

Lisa Parish from West Suffolk College recorded this video to explain the different ways they've used OneFile to keep in touch with learners during lockdown:

 

Remote visits

If you’re worried about travelling to visit learners, you can arrange a video call to meet with your learners remotely on OneFile. Using our Skype intergration, you can complete remote reviews or professional discussions easily online and record the conversation and upload as evidence. You could even ask learners to demonstrate their practical skills via video, speak to their employer and ask them to give you a tour to see how they’re settling into the workplace.

You can even use video just to check in with learners, offer support and set activities. It’s a great way to provide the personal touch without meeting in person.

Here's Cat Heaton from Hopwood Hall College explaining how they've used OneFile to maintain training and assessment during lockdown:

 

Providing feedback

OneFile will alert you when learners have completed tasks or sent you a message, so make sure you keep on top of feedback. You can submit feedback on journal entries, evidence and activities remotely, so there’s no need to schedule visits. Providing prompt feedback will help you stay productive and will help your learners too. Many learners will be in the same boat, so they may need a little motivation to stay on track with their teaching and learning in these uncertain times.

Organising your day

Working from home for a long period of time may be strange for many of us, so make sure you keep your calendar up to date and stay organised. With OneFile, you can also schedule calls, remote visits, plans and activities remotely. It can be tempting to bounce around from task to task when you’re working from home (or even do laundry!), so make sure you’re planning carefully and sticking to the task at hand. It’ll help you stay productive and keep on top of workload from home.

It’s also a great idea to maintain your normal working hours. Get your laptop or tablet out at 9am – or your normal start time – and make sure you put it away at the end of the day. It’s always better to get up and dressed, rather than work in your PJs, and then change into comfys at the end of the working day. It may be tempting to work from your bed at the beginning, but you’ll end up feeling sluggish very quickly!

Training sessions with OneFile

If you need support from OneFile, you can contact our support teams in all the normal ways. We’ve also upped our webinar schedule so you can attend training or speak to our success managers online. You can also log in to our helpdesk at any time to access user guides, videos, recorded webinars and top tips to help you get the most out of OneFile.

Working from home is a big adjustment for learners, tutors, managers and providers. To make sure make sure you have the right systems and processes in place for remote working, download your remote working checklist. It covers everything from video calling to safeguarding apprentices.

Or if you have questions about using OneFile at home or if you’d like to know more about the measures OneFile has in place to safeguard our customers, colleagues and community, please get in touch.