According to Viber’s global poll from 24 countries, most parents want their kids to go back to classes, while they are willing to employ Viber, alongside other e-learning apps, to facilitate communication during school processes.
Rakuten Viber, one of the world’s leading apps for free and easy communication, unveils the results of its global poll in which approximately 185,000 people took part. The poll, performed in 24 countries around the world, showed respondents overwhelmingly using the platform alongside major e-learning products to facilitate communication. Strikingly, more than 70% of users say they will use Viber during the coming school year to connect with all three groups: parents, teachers, and students.
It has been months since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and still schools globally are weighing how to move forward with the school year. In many countries, students will return to school physically and proceed with social-distancing friendly procedures. Others will employ a hybrid model or go fully remote, an option that has proven quite popular. According to Viber’s poll, 75% of respondents said the new school year should start in the classroom. All models, however, will require new methods of fostering education in a way that preserves normalcy as much as possible and ensures children receive access to the resources they need. Viber is serving students and teachers alike as an invaluable tool, whether online or offline, in the classroom or at home.
On average, 22% of the respondents said they use both Viber on desktop and mobile/tablet for educational purposes as a primary tool. This is also the situation in Russia while the percentage for the Philippines, Myanmar, Hungary and Ukraine is greater: almost 56%, 62%, 27%, 23% of the countries’ users, respectively, said they use both versions of Viber for the purpose of education. Other countries included in the poll include Western European countries such as the UK, France, and Germany, as well as countries in the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and North Africa.
In Vietnam, almost 23 millions students started the new school year on September 5th, in the most special way we have ever seen, following 5 principles: “Mask – Disinfection – No Gathering – Distancing – Medical Reporting”. Only a small number of students physically participated in the opening ceremony at school yard; while the majority attended online at home or in their classrooms. Most Vietnamese parents would like to have their children return to school, as long as the safety rules are guaranteed. In the last school year, parents and students were used to communicating and learning through online applications, among which Viber became a reliable choice.
Most respondents said they use Viber in the coming school year to communicate with, not only teachers and students, but parents. Viber’s versatile nature—the platform offers services ranging from video chats to group chats and polls, all secured by top-notch encryption—makes it a potent supplementary tool to support online and offline educational processes alike.
“A year ago, the future of education becoming 100% remote seemed like a vision for the next 10 or even more years. Then the pandemic hit and it happened overnight. As a parent, I have always used Viber to communicate with my kids. Throughout the last few months, we have seen many parents, students, and teachers using Viber to communicate for educational purposes, whether online or physically,” said Djamel Agaoua, CEO of Rakuten Viber.
New features will also be released in the coming weeks, such as quiz mode for polls (already rolling out), reminders in My Notes, and Media Gallery enhancements. In the end of the last school year, Viber was widely used for different educational purposes across the globe. Based on research conducted internally earlier this year by Viber in eight Central and Eastern European countries at the end of the last school year, 65% of the teachers said they used Viber as a tool that supports communication between classes.
About Rakuten Viber
At Rakuten Viber, we connect people. No matter who they are, or where they are from. Our global user base has access to a range of features like one-on-one chats, video calls, group messaging, and updates and discussions with their favorite brands and celebrities. We ensure our users have a secure and free environment to share their emotions.
Rakuten Viber is part of Rakuten Inc., a world leader in e-commerce and financial services. It is the official communication channel of FC Barcelona, and the official instant messaging and calling app partner of the Golden State Warriors.
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Press release distributed by EloQ Communications.