Educational facilities can’t survive without access to the right communication tools. Teachers need to be able to connect and collaborate over lesson plans. Educators need an effective way to reach their students, and everyone in the workforce relies on a consistent flow of knowledge throughout the organisation. In today’s rapidly evolving world, staying ahead of the curve means investing in UC.
Unified Communication tools empower educational facilities to boost collaboration and productivity between team members, wherever they are. Teachers can share insights from classroom to classroom, reach out to remote specialists, and even connect with students.
As the educational space continues to struggle with the aftermath of the pandemic, the use of Unified Communications tools is growing increasingly critical. Here are some of the top use cases for UC in education today.
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Boost Team Productivity
While an educational institution might not always run like a standard business, they’re still heavily reliant on the productivity and efficiency of staff. Teachers and training professionals have numerous tasks to deal with every day, as well as managing a constant flow of information and data. In this environment, the UC landscape can be extremely useful.
UC tools can make it easier for educators to track the flow of documents and information throughout an ecosystem, whether they’re dealing with an assignment submission from a student or getting a lesson plan approved. The right tools also make it easier for teams to access the information and support they need on the move through mobile apps and simple interfaces connected to the internet.
A modern UCaaS solution with an open environment can even integrate with a range of other tools essential to processes in the learning landscape, such as LMS systems for tracking student details and information. Plus, self-service tools, virtual assistants and bots can make it easier to search for information and complete tasks quickly.
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Unlock New Educational Avenues
The market for e-learning is currently growing at a rate of around 20%, with the potential to reach a value of $457.8 billion by 2026. Since the pandemic, many educational groups have been forced to embrace modern methods of learning, like online and remote teaching. This is likely to continue as we move ahead into a more digitally-transformative future.
With UC solutions, companies can combine their back-end communication strategies with the tools they use to connect with students. This opens the door to everything from video conferencing and chatting with students to managing entire student workflows in the cloud. Unified communication solutions can even come with tools to help educators create online webinars and teaching experiences for students to access asynchronously.
With the right UC tools, educators can also branch out and connect with other specialists to discuss their learning opportunities through online events and professional forums. With the ability to add new features and tools rapidly through the cloud, transformation can happen at speed.
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Transform Collaboration Opportunities
As mentioned above, UC solutions are excellent for bringing distributed team members together. This is crucial in an environment like a school, university, or training facility when people aren’t always located behind a desk. With cloud-based UC offerings like UCaaS, it’s easy for staff members to stay connected wherever they are and get assistance when they need it most.
What’s more, UC offerings make it easier for educational institutions to reach out to other specialists, collaborators, and partners capable of providing powerful learning experiences to students. With the right tools, teams can quickly interact with other educators from around the world, share files and ideas, and even create webinars or conferences for teaching students.
In the digital world where online learning is growing more popular, educational facilities can even hire remote and distributed educators and tutors to help assist students who might be studying from home. This makes it easier to expand the workforce without spending as much money on overheads. The overall result is a more diverse and powerful educational team.
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Boost Budget Savings
Virtually every organisation today is facing new challenges when it comes to managing and preserving cash flow. This is a particularly significant issue in the educational world, where many institutions are limited in the amount of funding they can access. Unified Communication tools can be an excellent way to keep costs low without compromising on performance.
Unified Communication tools, particularly those offered on an “as a service” basis, can be accessed on a subscription basis, allowing teams to pay only for the functionality they need. At the same time, these solutions allow businesses to combine multiple bills into one regular expense, so there are fewer expenses to keep track of throughout the year.
Cloud-based UCaaS technology also offers cost savings by reducing the amount of on-site technology and maintenance requirements a group needs to deal with. Educational facilities can even reduce the number of staff members they have on-site at any given time by enabling remote learning and keep overheads low in this way too.
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Unlock Insights for Better Growth
Finally, Unified Communications is a powerful way to reduce many of the silos in the educational environment. It can improve the flow of information, keep distributed team members connected, and reduce the risk of security errors all at the same time. However, the synchronised landscape offered by UC also has another distinctive benefit – the power to deliver better business insights.
With a full view of the educational institution, its processes, and its people in one place, leaders and administrators can collect valuable insights. It’s possible to track important information like when requests from students tend to spike and what kind of channels students use most to reach their professor. Companies can also track how teams collaborate and implement tools for making interactions between staff more straightforward.
With AI systems emerging to help companies make sense of the insights they collect from their UC technology, the possibilities for business transformation are endless.
