How Virtually Saves You Time

When you're managing an organization that offers live online learning, you have no time to waste. Unfortunately, keeping track of learners and delivering learning content can be a pretty tedious job -- especially if you're duct taping together a variety of different tools to make it happen. That's why at Virtually, our goal is to take care of that tedious, manual backend management so you can focus on what's important for your business: maximizing teaching and learning. Here are just a few ways that Virtually can save you time.

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Sending Event Invites

‍The Manual Way: Creating invites in Google Calendar, creating unique Zoom links in Zoom, copying and pasting learner emails from Excel.

‍The Virtually Way: Creating events is a one-step process with Virtually. When you create an event in Virtually, it will:

• Auto-export to the integrated calendar of your choice.
• Auto-create a unique Zoom link.
• Send an invite to the learners of your choice (grouped by School, Program, Tag, or individual learners so there is zero copy-pasting required).
• Send an (optional) auto-email notification that an event has been created.
• Send event reminders as aligned with a learner's Google Calendar settings.
• For those with Slack integration: all the notifications that get sent to learners via email will also get sent to the Slack channel of your choice!

All this in one fell swoop. Is this a time saver? We think yes.

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Attendance Tracking

The Manual Way: Counting learners in a Zoom room throughout an event (which generally requires having a person in addition to the main instructor to do so), tracking attendance in an Excel spreadsheet (often with complex formulas that can easily break with one wrong step).

The Virtually Way: When you integrate with Zoom, Virtually will auto-pull attendance data without you having to lift a finger. Virtually will auto-track:

• When learners entered the Zoom room.
• When they left.
• How long they stayed.
• If they arrived late (after the first 15 min).
• If they were absent.

There's even an area to add an excuse if a learner has an excused absence.

We then take that data and break it down by event and by student. Pretty soon our analytics modules will showcase average event attendance per program too.

Is this a time saver? You bet!

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Sending Announcements

The Manual Way: Copy and paste learner emails of a specific program from a spreadsheet into an email.

The Virtually Way: Send announcements across multiple channels simultaneously. This will send your announcement to all learners in that group (without having to copy/paste a thing or worry you've sent it to the wrong group of students), and will also stay visible on your program's group posts wall. If you have Slack integration, these announcements will go out to Slack too!

Shaving off a few minutes can save tons of time in the long run. Time saver? Affirmative.

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Uploading Class Recordings

The Manual Way: Host a class on Zoom, record the class, download the recording, upload the recording to Youtube, put the link in a password protected Google Drive folder or Notion doc, hope your learners can find it....

The Virtually Way: (Coming Soon) When you create an event in Virtually hosted on Zoom, you can toggle the "auto-upload recordings" toggle so that your classroom recording automatically appears in your learner's dashboard under the specific past event associated with the recording.

(Currently - you can upload recordings and slides directly to past events.)

Time saver and hard drive memory saver? Absolutely.

And there you have it! These are just a few of the ways that using Virtually to manage your live online learning program saves you time.

Of course, we're building and growing every day -- so expect that functionality and time savings to sky rocket as time goes on.

Read Next: How To Build An Online Course With Virtually

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