Today, our global universities are increasingly focussed on the need to attract students that they will retain throughout a postgraduate study, expand their reach beyond the physical boundaries of the campus location, and improve their commercial models by building stronger and deeper relationships with local businesses, research institutions, and public service organizations.
Digital strategies and technologies
Digital and EdTech strategies play a significant role in each of these areas and are fast becoming the key differentiator for universities, academics, and students.
The number of students studying remotely has been increasing over the last decade. It continues to grow, fueled by COVID-19 and students’ emerging awareness that they can attend the institution of their choice without having to shoulder the cost or endure the inconvenience of relocating.
Watch our five-minute round-up of global university leaders who are turning to digital technologies to find sustainable, long-term solutions for students, fellow academics, and administration staff. Also featured are some technology thought leaders who have helped a wide array of higher education institutions modernize and give their tips to local universities on how to launch a digital campus.
Cloud-based communications and collaboration
With RingCentral for Education, you can easily bring students, faculty, and campus communities together all in one secure workspace.
Let your community choose how to interact—social, message, video, or phone—and enable various groups to work together. Engage your virtual classrooms, and collaborate in real time in an easy-to-manage and secure place to drive connection.
Any time. Any device. Anywhere. Learning is always in session. See how we can support your organization today and beyond COVID-19.
Engage your virtual classrooms
Teach like everyone’s in the same room by connecting and engaging with students and faculty, no matter where they are or what device they’re on.
- Interact in new ways. Welcome students to your virtual classroom with one-click video and audio on any browser or the RingCentral app.
- Engage your students. Make it easy for students to collaborate with live messaging and screen sharing.
- Share lectures instantly. Record every lesson and archive them on leading learning management tools like Canvas, so students can catch up on what they missed.
Choose easy management
Connect your entire community. Keep your school, district, or campus running with a partially or fully remote team.
- Lessen the admin load. Set up personalized voice messages and auto-receptionist to route calls to the right person at the right time.
- Stay connected on any device. Free students, educators, and staff to collaborate easily with messaging, phone, or video calls.
- Share instant updates. Keep faculty members, teachers, students, and parents in the loop with real-time messaging, SMS, and social media posts.
Foster collaboration
Learn and grow together. Get all the tools you need to create a culture of collaboration.
- Connect outside of class. Keep the conversation going before, during, and after lessons with team messaging and file sharing.
- Share big ideas with big groups. Bring parents, board members, and teachers together with unlimited conference calls for hundreds of participants.
- Keep the community spirit alive. Give students, teachers, and parents what they need to build a community outside school hours with one-click video meetings, messaging, and phone capabilities.
Reimagine services
Bring all your campus services together to support the student. Support, engage, and inspire your way to a happier, more connected campus with an omnichannel contact center.
- Provide immediate, helpful service for your campus every time. Connect students, alumni, and donors with the right teams to solve their problems right from the start—from anywhere.
- Create powerful admissions experiences. Make memorable, lasting connections with personalized, automated, outbound campaign management.
- Go beyond voice. From live chat, Twitter, or WhatsApp to YouTube comments, make every interaction with your campus feel like it’s one-on-one.
Embrace integrations
Keep using the apps you love. RingCentral integrates with hundreds of tools that you rely on every day—Canvas, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and more.
- Work within your LMS. Schedule or manage your RingCentral Video meetings without ever leaving your Canvas application.
- Leverage existing tools. Drive your classroom productivity and efficiency by integrating rich RingCentral communications and collaboration features with your Google apps and Microsoft products.
- Leverage a connected CRM. Empower your Salesforce system with powerful RingCentral communications capabilities.
Maintain security and privacy
Keep school information safe. RingCentral protects all your information and conversations with industry-recommended and compliant data centers and seven layers of comprehensive security.
- Admin, IT, and parents can feel confident that RingCentral meets the standards for COPPA, FERPA, HIPAA, and CCPA.
- RingCentral collects, maintains, processes, and shares this student personal data on behalf and at the direction of the school partner to deliver support for internal operations of the service.
- We do not use student personal data for other commercial purposes.
Build a world-class virtual university experience
It took a global pandemic for universities to jump-start their digital transformation, but there’s no turning back now. They’ve seen how digitization enables even the largest and most mature organizations to respond to crisis, whether it’s standing up a remote work model or changing how students learn. A critical goal in transforming will be differentiating your university’s student engagement model. Learn how RingCentral for Education can help you build a world-class virtual university experience.
Originally published Feb 18, 2021, updated Apr 23, 2021