Enabling Key Education Workflows with Pre-packaged and Programmable Communications Solutions to Enhance Student and Teacher Journeys
The objective of this study is to enable market participants to more effectively address both long-standing challenges and the current pain points and shifting scenarios that COVID-19 has presented.
The analyst has identified the education vertical as being ripe for a digital transformation involving the adoption of modern communications and collaboration technologies with the objective of improving operational efficiencies, instructor performance, and students’ experience.
The COVID-19-induced need for social distancing unmasked this sector’s lack of preparedness to work remotely when required.
The pandemic-induced changes in the education vertical have been profound and pervasive:
- Campus is no longer physical-only
- Education can take place anywhere
- Courses must be built around in-person and remote modalities, switching between the two as needed
- Climate events and distance to school lose relevance
- Synchronous scenarios are better for students exchanging ideas and opinions and for those who need more guidance; students can learn from each other, and the teacher can build groups
- Asynchronous scenarios work if students need to engage at their own pace, do homework before a class, or if the level of prior knowledge of a subject among students varies significantly
From implementing remote classes to enabling mass communication, education organizations have made significant efforts to maintain operations and engagement.
Although some organizations were already embracing digitization and virtual classes, the pandemic showed clearly that only the first small steps have been taken towards the goal of digitization and that use cases are still emerging.
Digital technologies, including communications and collaboration solutions, as well as programmable platforms, must be leveraged as key enablers of accelerated and effective transformation within education organizations.
In order to properly apply programmable communications and other digital technologies to address education organizations’ particular needs, a clear understanding of the processes and workflows and their chokepoints is required.
Research Highlights
This study discusses opportunities for improving student and staff experiences and enhancing important workflows in the sector using pre-packaged communications and collaboration solutions as well as application programming interfaces (APIs) and programmable communications capabilities.
This study highlights key use cases for point solutions such as video conferencing, team collaboration, as well as integrated suites such as unified communications and collaboration (UCC), UC as a service (UCaaS), contact center and contact center as a service (CCaaS), and communication platform as a service (CPaaS) solutions in the education sector.
More specifically, this study identifies the following use cases whereby advanced communications tools can deliver value to education organizations:
- Live one-on-one tutoring and counseling
- Live virtual classroom or guest speaker presentations
- Asynchronous hybrid classroom
- Synchronous distributed classroom
- Teacher, student, parent, and staff communications
- Reminders, notifications, and emergency alerts
The study identifies the key growth opportunities within the education sector for different types of communications solutions, such as video conferencing, UCC and UCaaS, contact center and CCaaS, CPaaS, and communications devices.
