One of the challenges many industries and organisations faced once the COVID-19 vaccines had been distributed, and lockdowns had lifted for good was technologies and practices from the pandemic should be dropped and what should be sustained.
There are myriad benefits to in-person collaboration, and no industry benefits more from in-person experience than education, where it's critical to young people's learning and social development. Naturally, then, much of what was enforced during COVID-19 was reversed once the schools reopened.
But not everything.
"During lockdown, a lot of teachers in the schools that I worked with were already quite used to having an expert on a screen come in and talk to them," Mina Patel, Head of Videoconferencing and Online Safety at the London Borough of Redbridge, told UC Today at ISE Barcelona 2025.
"But it was a new experience for all of them to be that expert, sitting at home on that screen going into pupils' homes. It forced a lot of them to learn to use the online platforms and become more confident with using them, and I feel as though they saw that working, and that was a positive thing."
Patel leads the implementation of videoconferencing technology across schools in the London Borough of Redbridge, ensuring the right platforms—mainly Zoom but also Microsoft Teams and Google Meet—are in place. She supports teachers in using videoconferencing to enhance learning, connect with experts and museums worldwide, and integrate it across all subjects, organising and planning its effective use.
Back in the beginning of the pandemic, Patel and her team bought a lot of hardware, namely webcams and laptops, intending to enable teachers to do remote work. While all pupils are back in the classroom for face-to-face lessons, video conferencing has continued to empower teachers post-pandemic.
"We want to bring experts in from, let's say, at a York archaeological museum," Patel suggested, "We want to meet a Viking up in York, and we're based in London. We may want to connect the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and have a lesson with a marine biologist. Teachers may want to have training with a university up north, a CPD session. We're connecting all over nationally and globally to meet experts for professional development and for pupils to learn."
However, the webcams they used during the pandemic no longer suffice.
"You've got 30 pupils in a class or classroom, and all different settings, so you can have children sitting around a desk, five little desks with small groups of pupils, or you can have pupils in a hall sitting in a row because they're having a live assembly. So all environments are different," Patel explained.
So those legacy webcams no longer worked because everybody's in one space now, which is why we had to go out, source and work with the AV industry, examining all the brilliant hardware-wise technologies they've been developing and then bring that into the classroom."
That collaboration with the AV industry is why Patel was at ISE this year, as she's ever-vigilant for technologies and strategies to enhance the classroom videoconferencing experience even further.
Audio is a particular focus for Patel this year.
