Our Response to COVID-19

We want to let our schools know that our team is prepared to support you, our school community, in response to COVID-19. We have been closely monitoring the virus, and have been taking proactive steps to mitigate any impact to our customers and employees. We have a business continuity plan to address a number of scenarios that may arise and want to let you know that we are dedicated to working with our schools in need while keeping our employees safe. Internally, we are taking the below measures to ensure there is no interruption to Faria’s products or services:

• We are monitoring each of our 9 global offices and encouraging employees to work from home when possible.
• We are halting all non-essential travel, and handling any essential travel on a case-by-case basis.
• We are assessing employee health before any face to face interactions with our schools.
• We are moving most of our professional development services online and supporting other organisations in their efforts to take planned events virtual.

We have taken steps to support our school community including the following:

• We have added additional server instances with auto-scaling to automatically add server capacity during traffic spikes & high load as we see more schools relying on ManageBac to be an online classroom.
• We have developed resources for schools on best practices & processes for how to handle the current situation:
  • Read one of our blog posts:
    • The Five Essential Questions You Need To Be Asking During A Global Outbreak Like Coronavirus
    • Using ManageBac in a Remote Environment
    • Leading Teams Virtually
  • Join us for one of our webinars, like Leaders Helping Leaders: A Conversation about Remote Learning or Teachers Helping Teachers: A Conversation about Remote Learning. If you miss a webinar, you can view our recordings here.
• For users at Chinese schools accessing ManageBac outside of China, our Technical Operations team has been establishing multiple proxies in various data centers in order to try to improve the flow of network traffic through the Great Firewall.
• We have suspended all physical events, including workshops, professional learning and conferences, until we have a better understanding of the situation. In an effort to support continued learning, we have expanded our work in the virtual arena and are offering online cohorts, online professional development and training along with a larger selection of webinars. Our hope is that we can continue to learn and collaborate with one another as we explore new ways of learning. Join us for any of our free webinars, and check back as we continue to add more resources in the coming weeks.

  For any schools not currently using ManageBac who are being affected by the virus, we are offering free access to ManageBac. If interested, please let us know. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Our support lines are staffed 24 hours/day, 5 days per week. Thank you for being part of our community. We understand the critical role we play in you and your school, and we are here to support you during this time.