This is an excerpt from our ebook "How to Create Great Learning Experiences and Optimize Education Administration with Technology." You can read the other excerpts below:
- Why Teachers Should Leverage AI & Micro-Learning While Remote
- 3 Ways Technology Can Optimize Education Administration
The speed with which the COVID-19 pandemic occurred left many institutions of higher learning scrambling.
Even schools with long experiences in deploying devices to learners, using learning management systems, and leveraging robust electronic student record systems found themselves unprepared for a truly 100% digital learning environment. They lacked the tools to give students a truly unified and contextual experience.
As a result, the online learning experience is often poor and disjointed.
For example, a class assignment might be handed out using an online video conferencing platform such as Zoom. Study-group messages would then follow in WhatsApp, Slack, or some other group messaging platform. Students might share files in Google Drive or Dropbox, create presentations in PowerPoint, Prezi, or Slides, and share editing and content suggestions back and forth via email.
Once the project is complete, and all the jigsaw pieces are assembled, the final work might be submitted through a platform such as Blackboard or Moodle. Continuing to operate this way directly threatens the competitiveness of the educational institution.
According to a McKinsey study, 1 in 3 students now seek colleges with better online learning capabilities.
Microsoft Teams is uniquely positioned to be the foundation of a unified platform experience. Microsoft 365 is ubiquitous across the educational landscape. More than 230,000 educational institutions are already using Microsoft Teams in some capacity for hybrid or remote learning during the pandemic.
Microsoft 365 allows teachers to meet with students and for those students to co-author collaborate on projects simultaneously. Microsoft Teams can support chat, voice, and video calls in addition to the easy sharing of relevant content via OneDrive and SharePoint.
This simplifies the experience for educators and learners, so they do less context switching and have all their information organized coherently in one place.
This can have a tremendous impact on student satisfaction and productivity. One study showed a majority of users would prefer to do household chores or deal with an insurance company than navigate between platforms!
Having a universal platform for a learning framework enables educators to create flexible environments that facilitate learning and are accessible to the widest range of users as well. This is why solutions like AvePoint Curricula, a Learning Management System that leverages Microsoft Teams as its foundation, are so important to supporting learning wherever it takes place, in whatever language learners are speaking.
Rather than being an inhibitor, these new tools give institutions of higher learning the opportunity to broaden their scope and reach out to more learners.
Want to learn how to improve the online learning experience for your students via a shift in technology? Read the full ebook here!
