Student Safety Policy

This document explains what TalkAbroad does to keep our online conversations safe. How we do this is guided by our organization ethic:

Enjoying healthy relationships that are identified by respect, commitment, and cultural understanding.

Hiring

TalkAbroad prioritizes potential conversation partners that are referred by a local in-country not-for-profit organization, a client university, or a pre-existing conversation partner.

Training

We train conversation partners to carefully follow these safety protocols:

1. Conversing about sex, religion, and politics is prohibited, except as instructed by the professor in the assignment they create on talkabroad.com.
2. Requesting or sharing personal contact information is prohibited, as is any flirtatious or otherwise disturbing behavior out of keeping with our organization ethic.
3. If something happens in a conversation that makes a conversation partner uncomfortable, they are to report this.

Monitoring

Our human resources and training team works closely with our technical support team so they are able to monitor all conversations as they occur. Students are able to request help while conversations are ongoing.

Review

All conversations happen in TalkAbroad’s own online platform. All conversations are recorded and the data is archived after completion. Students, teachers and our evaluation team are able to listen to the conversations after they are complete. This allows our team to follow up on requests to determine if our safety protocols were not followed and take the appropriate action.

Feedback

After each conversation, feedback is required from the student before further conversations can be scheduled. Our team reviews all conversations rated 6/10 or lower.

Actions

If our safety policy is not followed, our human resources team investigates and takes the appropriate actions. These may include, but are not limited to, additional training, suspension, and removal of the conversation partner from our team.

Support for Heightened Supervision

In order to support the need for heightened supervision required by certain high schools, a special “high school professor account” is available. This account allows high schools to create and control their students’ accounts. Usernames and passwords are automatically generated to ensure students’ real names or emails are never stored in our system. Additionally, professors can (a) select the conversation partners with whom the students will speak, (b) choose the times of the conversations, and (c) log students in and out so the professor can be present during conversations.