Presentation by Laura Marks, Head of Community

Overview

The Atomic Jolt team recently met with Laura, head of community at Virtually, a system to help manage live, online, cohort based learning. The goal of Virtually is to bring together business management (payments), learning management (event management, content resources, assignments), and student records (outcome tracking) under one platform. And – most importantly – save users time on mundane, back-end admin work so they can spend more time teaching and learning. We hope you find learning about Virtually as interesting and helpful as we did!

Timestamped Outline

• 0:00 Introduction to Virtually
• 3:27 Basic functionality
• 8:17 What kinds of programs use Virtually and what is the benefit?
• 8:38 Updates
• 13:51 Creating sections from a cohort
• 14:21 Payment information
• 14:45 Upcoming student dashboard features
• 15:27 Conclusion and Q&A

Narrative by Dani Morris

Purpose and Goal of Virtually

As online learning and cohort based learning started growing, the Virtually team realized there is no “one platform” to help manage live, online, cohort based learning programs. This was a problem they wanted to solve, so they created Virtually as an easy way for admins and instructors to manage their online courses and for students to navigate through.

Virtually is currently being used for bootcamps, accelerator courses, religious learning programs, extracurriculars, and more.

Integrations

Virtually integrates with Zoom, Gcal, Stripe, and Slack. A program may be using other tools, but the management of it is happening in Virtually.

Student and Class Management Made Easier

Virtually offers group posting as a way for learners to interact with their learning community and for teachers to update learners on important course information (these can also be sent out as an email as well). There is also a learner directory, where students can schedule one-on-one time with teachers and mentors or reach out to their coursemates.

As an admin you can invite students to courses, add admins to courses, and add recordings and slides to events. Further, users can also add and build assignments.

The biggest thing is being able to have one place where they can have a learner register for a course and automatically have access to content. They also want to help admin and teachers overcome the manual nature of sending events, outcome tracking, and attendance.

Virtually will flag students who have low attendance or late assignments so teachers can contact them. The goal of this is to simplify the process of intervening before students drop a course.

Future Updates

• Admin dashboard – they want to give you a sense of their entire school/company/program, and then give you a sense of the schools themselves and then trickle down and give robust student data.

• Earning summary (if integrate with Stripe) so you can see monthly total and see more specific info

• Attendance tracking module

• Student database, where users can tag students and can categorize learners. Useful because when you go to create events Virtually know who your students are so you don’t have to copy and paste student data from an Excel spreadsheet.

• Analytics modules.

• Enrollment function

• Event creation dialogue is changing soon with an auto upload of recordings available with Zoom.

Conclusion

Virtually excels at working closely with their active users to fast track new features and updates.  For more information go to the Virtually website.