“The Taipei City Bureau of Education is grateful for the partnership of EVOX, who provided their cloud-based telephone customer system so we could offer a toll-free hotline. Together, we worked to protect the mental health of Taipei City students."
from Taipei City Bureau of Education Press Release
When classes were suspended both students and parents panicked. The Taipei City Department of Education set up a dedicated hotline to provide information and counseling.
With the government's announcement of a three-level alert system, campuses across Taiwan were facing the challenges resulting from suspended classes. To ensure students continued to learn, teachers and students had to quickly adopt cloud platforms such as CooC-Cloud to continue education remotely. In addition to adapting to the new teaching platform, parents and students faced the bigger challenge of dealing with the stress and psychological pressure of remote learning.
In recent years, the Taipei city Department of Education jointly developed a campus suicide prevention system with National Chengchi University. (Source: EVOX)
According to international research studies, the sudden suspension of classes has a considerable psychological impact on students. This is particularly true for primary and secondary school students, who generally have relatively passive study habits. For younger students, it is not easy to develop active and independent learning habits at home. Moreover, prolonged isolation from classmates and teachers can cause feelings of loneliness and even depression.
In order to help parents and students through this extraordinary period, the Taipei City Department of Education cooperated with Professor Xu's team from the Department of Psychology at National Chengchi University. With a team of 30 professional clinical psychologists, they prepared to set up a “Taipei Student Counseling Toll-Free Hotline” to provide professional counseling and help during the epidemic.
The first problem they faced was how to distribute calls from the same dedicated line to counselors who were all working from different places. The project coordinator, principal Zhang Yingfei of Bailing High School, was tasked with finding a system that could provide this functionality.
EVOX Cloud PBX allows psychologists to remotely connect to the dedicated hotline.
Principal Zhang was already actively promoting digital transformation for the campus. Her projects included forward-looking information infrastructure construction as well as the introduction of many external resources (such as mobile devices, network construction, big screens for classrooms and course creation tools). Each class at the school would have a large screen and a variety of mobile devices (iPad, Chromebook, Surface Go) for use.
Bailing High School is an advanced demonstration digital campus, allowing teachers from other schools to visit (Source: Bailing High School)
Principal Zhang realized that the power of digitization could also be applied to her current project. She became aware of the capabilities of EVOX Cloud PBX through the recommendation of Mr. Lin from Wanfang High School. Since cloud PBX does not rely on physical telephone lines to operate, it would provide a low-cost solution to allow counselors to easily connect to the dedicated hotline from their offices or homes.
This was an ideal solution for a temporary project that did not require any budget to buy and install equipment or physical phone lines. Cloud PBX also meant there was no need to set up expensive mobile services and pay to forward incoming calls from the dedicated line. The only call charges were associated with the dedicated toll-free line, and could be handled and reviewed through the project's account. There would be no need to reimburse the counselors or callers for this service.
Further reading:
Understanding the difference between cloud PBX and traditional PBX.
Once the EVOX account was set up, counselors could answer calls to the dedicated line through the EVOX mobile extension (Mobile App) on their mobile phone during their scheduled shift. With no location restriction, the counselors could choose the most convenient place to answer calls to minimize missed calls.
Counselors can switch devices at any time to truly realize the potential of mobile office (Picture source: EVOX)
Many counselors prefer to handle the counseling session in an environment where they are not distracted, even when they are working remotely. Since EVOX also supports a PC version (PC App), some counselors decided to use their laptop in a dedicated quiet space to ensure professional service. In addition to not having to hold the phone for a long time, the PC App allows them to continue to work on their PC during idle time.
Online administration allows supervisors to easily set up shifts.
Since most of the counselors are part time, the administrator needed to assign different counselors to shifts to provide complete coverage for the hotline. They would never have had this flexibility with a traditional PBX system, which requires a trained technician to be onsite to change settings.
EVOX continuously upgrades the online management tool to become even more intuitive and easy to use. The system administrator does not require any IT background to log in and set extensions or change shifts. The schedule was easy for the administrator to view and change so that incoming calls would only ring counselors who were scheduled to receive calls.
With the intuitive online administration tool, setting and browsing work shifts is easy (Picture source: EVOX)
Principal Zhang was glad that with EVOX they were able to quickly set up the system and train their counselors. This allowed them to launch their counseling hotline quickly and ensure parents and students had timely access to mental support during the epidemic.
