EDUCATION COLLABORATION
A learning opportunity? Students have returned to classrooms, right? So is there any advantage to learning about education for the UC&C industry?
education specialist, Martin McDermott. “The pandemic kicking in really started to open up lots of communication issues that schools had. Obviously they needed to put something in place for the students to be taught remotely and it really did become very evident that they were not ready for the pandemic. “As a result, the Department for Education realised a lot of schools didn’t have the good strong WiFi networks to facilitate this type of distance learning and collaboration, and put in place another programme called Connect the Classroom which offers £150 million of funding for specific schools within deprived areas across the UK. “What we are doing is we’re working with those schools that have a need for upgrading their WiFi solutions, and therefore produce more collaborative learning and educational needs for the students. We still see the need for a really good strong WiFi network across schools, so that the teachers can deliver engaging lessons and be collaborative with their peers.” Role of trust While the usage of collaboration platforms may have taken a dive in the classroom, it hasn’t gone away completely. As more schools become incorporated into Academic Trusts, video conferencing enables communication between those schools for both teachers and pupils to learn and better the education experience. “With schools coming together under Multi Academy Trusts (MATS) there’s potentially lots of teachers that could be roaming between different schools delivering lessons,” said McDermott. “As more schools join these trusts, teachers are realising they can teach a class remotely in another school as well as in person. Therefore they want seamless connectivity between schools.” Chris Southern, General Sales Manager of Enterprise solutions at Midwich built on McDermott’s point, adding that the introduction
Jed Macosko Professor of Physics
After years of half terms and summer holidays where parents trudged off to work whilst the children stayed at home, the shoe is on the other foot! While the kids are putting on uniforms and commuting everyday, the grown ups have the option to stay at home for the majority of the week; in what can only be described as the smallest of victories! Of course it was inevitable that pupils would return to the classroom. But that doesn’t mean that collaboration platforms have become obsolete overnight, as Jed Macosko, Professor of Physics at Wake Forest University, points out, Teams and Zoom are great for enabling “virtual office hours, virtual internships, and virtual classes on snow days. “All three of those areas are perfect use cases for collaboration tools. Now that the world has seen how easy it is to have a virtual summer intern as compared to someone in- person, or how easy it is to hold online office hours instead of actually being in one’s office, it’s hard to go back to the old ways.” Those “old ways” are unlikely to return too, as the importance of connectivity within schools was one of the “wake up calls” that educational institutions across the country felt according to TP-Link Business Development Manager and
www.wfu.edu
The Department for Education realised a lot of schools didn’t have the good strong Wi Fi networks to facilitate this type of distance
learning and collaboration
CONTINUED
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