COVID-19 Video Interviews

← Back To News

If you can't do face-to-face meetings any more, why not do video interviews? We've combined a new feature in School Interviews with a free video conferencing service to make this almost as simple as setting up normal events. Read on to find out just how easily you can provide remote interviews.

Our video interviews solution is made up of two parts: Whereby (a video conferencing system) and a small upgrade to School Interviews.

Whereby

 

WE NO LONGER RECOMMEND WHEREBY Whereby now charge handsomely for their service, and have made changes that make it work less well for school interviews. We now have much better support for Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

Whereby is a video conferencing system similar to Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams or Zoom.  We're not affiliated with Whereby, but we've done a little research and they have got a reputation for simple and effective video conferences. And they have some unique features that make them perfect for running video interviews:

• If each teacher sets up their own Whereby account, it's free. So you can run video interviews at no extra cost.
• Parents connect to a Whereby conference (they call them "rooms") by simply clicking a link. They don't need to install apps, or have a Gmail/Microsoft account, or even register.
• Teachers can control who enters and leaves their Whereby room, so they can allow in one parent at a time.

Obviously Whereby won't work for parents without access to an internet-connected device, but perhaps teachers could offer to phone any parents for whom this is an issue. And the only other drawback is Whereby's colour scheme, which makes us feel a wee bit queasy!

School Interviews

WE NOW HAVE MUCH BETTER SUPPORT FOR MULTI-MODE MEETINGS Click here to learn more.

We've tweaked School Interviews to make it easy to manage teacher's Whereby rooms (or any other internet links). We now have a new setting on the Advanced Settings page (click the link at the top of the EVENT page). Here's a screenshot with the hint expanded:

This allows you to change the term for teacher details from the default "Details" to "Video interview" in this case. Why? Because we've changed the way School Interviews displays a teacher's details:

• If you enter text for a teacher's details, we'll show it exactly as before - as text.
• If you enter a URL starting with "http", we'll show it as a link, with the term for teacher details ("Video interview" in this example) as the link text.

An example will help. Let's set up two teachers with different details (note how DETAILS has changed to VIDEO INTERVIEW):

Romilda Vane's details are a link, whereas Dolores Umbridge has a phone number. If a parent made bookings with both of them, they'll get an email like this:

When parents click the video interview link, Whereby asks them to enter their name and "knock" on the room door. This alerts the teacher, who can either let them into the room or put them on hold if they are still finishing up the previous interview.

Putting It All Together

So how exactly do you set up an video interview event? Here's the process:

1. Get each teacher to sign up for a Whereby room, and send you their room's link.
2. Each teacher should explore how their Whereby room works, and how to lock it so they can control who enters. Whereby is pretty simple, but we'll be publishing a set of instructions here in the next few days.
3. On the School Interviews Advanced Settings page, set the teacher details term to whatever you want the link to read ("Video interview" in our example).
4. For each teacher, add their Whereby room link (including the "https://") to their VIDEO INTERVIEW field. If you have lots of teachers, you can import the teacher names, classes and details/links from a spreadsheet on the Teacher Data page (link on TEACHERS page).
5. Set up the event timetable on the EVENT page, and add instructions to the confirmation message asking parents to click the video interview link at the time of the booking.
6. All done - open bookings!

Last updated Tue 2 May 2023 by MessageMyWay Support.