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Education is a broad and varied field, covering everything from public preschool to highly specialized colleges. There are, however, a few things that they all have in common. The biggest similarity they all share is their end goal, to supply students with more knowledge and experience than they had before attending. 
Every education organization, to some extent, also wants to ensure their students are well-cared for and their faculty is engaged. There are many useful tools your average institute can use to accomplish this, and communication systems are among them.
Today, modern schools and universities face many challenges regarding communications. For most, UCaaS and CCaaS are the perfect solution.
Education organizations, also known as schools, face several challenges regarding communication.
For starters, let’s address the elephant in the room. A little something happened back in 2020 that required schools all around the country to provide a remote learning experience. For most schools, this proved to be much easier said than done, and only a few years later, the phenomenon of Zoom school became widely unfavorable.
Still, many higher education institutions continue to have a demand for remote learning. It’s a very convenient method for your average graduate student, but it requires a robust communication environment. The larger and more spread out the class, the greater the demand on the system.
While schools use advanced communication technology to benefit their remote students, they also tend to keep legacy devices in their environments. It’s not uncommon for schools with intercom systems to keep them around, since it’s more cost effective to integrate them with a new solution than replace them.
Furthermore, schools must comply with strict E911 guidelines, especially in lower education where children are involved. In an emergency, the school needs to reach the authorities even if it doesn’t have internet access.
Finally, there are challenges with disparate groups of people involved. Students, faculty, and in some cases parents, guardians, and the government all need to be easily reached and engaged. These groups all have different needs, and some will be resistant to change.
When designing communication solutions, these are all things that schools need to account for. Luckily, UCaaS and CCaaS solutions provide benefits for schools of all sizes that mitigate these challenges.
When it comes to providing remote learning, UCaaS is the ultimate solution. By combining calling, messaging, video, and other communication channels on one platform, it allows users to build effective and even welcoming hybrid or virtual classrooms.
Modern UC platforms come not only with high quality audio and video, but also with features like digital whiteboards and hand-raising functions that can uniquely benefit teachers and students. Solutions like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, especially the Rooms version, transform classrooms into advanced meeting rooms that create a consistent experience for students on the premises and at home.
With proper implementation, a UCaaS solution can integrate with most legacy communication technology. This includes intercoms, alarms, desk phones, door phones, and even fax machines. These devices may show their age in a digital environment but keeping them reduces costs and ensures E911 compliance.
Along with old devices, new devices can integrate with a UCaaS solution to improve the learning experience. Students can connect tablets, notebooks, or even smartphones to the UC platform, expanding the ways they’re able to engage with classes in the room or remotely.
Finally, UCaaS solutions provide the field of education with the benefits of inclusion and accessibility. This technology breaks down not just geographical barriers, but also language and ability barriers.
Lesson recordings create a more flexible experience for students, features like closed captioning and customizable layouts account for disabilities and different learning styles, and AI interpreters provide real-time translations to help multi-lingual learners.
Omnichannel contact centers benefit schools in the same ways they benefit other businesses. They streamline communications with automated routing, notifications, and follow-ups. Real-time analytics drastically improve data and reporting capabilities and make it much easier to handle a large volume of calls and messages.
A school may use its CCaaS solution to enhance admissions and enrollment. This is an extremely vital process for schools, especially private institutions. With CCaaS, automation makes the busy work of admissions a non-factor, giving admissions counselors the ability to help students solve more pressing and complex problems.
Universities can use a CCaaS solution to set up a student support center to assist with course registration, living arrangements, financial aid, counseling, and IT support. Operating across multiple channels, this student support center will be easy to access and allow students to get the help they need in a timely manner.
Lower education institutes can use a CCaaS solution to improve collaboration between faculty, students, and parents. Communication barriers between these three groups is upsettingly common in schools across the country. CCaaS deals with this by providing a single platform where everyone can be reached with little difficulty.
Finally, CCaaS improves a school’s emergency response capabilities. Provided the internet remains intact, the school can quickly send out messages and alerts through the contact center to make sure as many people as possible are well-informed and ready to act.
The world of education is vast and diverse. While UCaaS and CCaaS have plenty of benefits to offer all kinds of schools, each one will need to implement these solutions differently. A UC or contact center deployment will look very different for an Ivy League university than it will for a community college or suburban high school.
That’s where a provider like Continuant can help.
At Continuant, we have 28 years of experience in the world of communications, with expertise in both legacy devices and modern solutions; the old and the new. We’ll determine and design the perfect solution that meets your needs, satisfies your faculty and student body alike, and doesn’t break the bank.
That’s just what we did for our friends at Baylor University. When they wanted to migrate from a Nortel CS1000 PBX to Microsoft Teams, we came along to provide technology that would make it easier. An industry-leading SBC allowed them to connect all their legacy Nortel devices to their new UC solution. To top it off, we also helped them integrate a Five9 contact center and provided a full user adoption program to ensure they knew how to use it.
If we could help Baylor, we can help you too. Schedule a call with us to get started.
