Many companies have been guilty of shoehorning a collaboration tool into a scenario that it wasn’t designed for over the course of the last 18 months.
It may not have been ideal but was, generally, a quick fix while businesses prepared for a more permanent state of remote or hybrid working.
But one industry has been forced to carry on with unoptimised collaboration platforms is the education space, according to Craig Walker, Global Head of SaaS Integration at Alcatel Lucent Enterprise.
Speaking to UC Today, he explained that many education institutions have been using generic platforms to communicate with students remotely – which has presented a number of difficulties.
Ranging from maintaining the persistence of a course and reviewing previous lessons, to accessing resources and keeping virtual classrooms secure – many obstacles are still being overcome by both teachers and students.
It was these obstacles that led to the inception of Rainbow Classroom by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.
Rainbow Classroom is built on ALE’s Rainbow CPaaS but it has been architected from the ground up to extend the physical classroom to an active, collaborative learning environment, rather than being a slightly remoulded corporate comms platform.
The aim, Walker said, is to solve common problems in the education sector, with the technology itself fading into the background.
“We looked at this from the teacher’s life, the student’s life and the admin’s life to create the user experience,” he explained.
“The goal was to make everything easier for all concerned and provide engaging education by getting the technology out of the way.
“We didn’t want to provide a passive learning environment like a lot of platforms; we wanted to create an active learning environment for students to perform at the best of their ability.”
Rainbow Classroom achieves this by integrating seamlessly with an education institution’s existing learning management system (LMS).
The virtual classroom is persistent across the duration of an academic course and becomes a digital hub for students – housing elements such as recorded lessons, virtual whiteboards, work documents and chat histories.
Students also use the same known LMS access throughout the course, rather than having a separate link each week which disintegrates course material.
Hybrid Working Learning
Hybrid working may have been the buzzword of 2021, but the impact of the pandemic means that that education space will also see a permanent change – particularly in the older age ranges.
