Industry: Education Region: EMEA Technology: Webex Teams
To combat its many educational challenges, including teacher shortages and a vast urban population, one country’s educational department decided to seek out technology options that would allow teachers to reach more students throughout the day, without raising the already high student-to-teacher ratios.
Once contacted about this opportunity, one of the difficulties Cisco had to work through was the fact that there were not enough teachers in particular specialties, such as English or math. Thus, the question became, “How can we best utilize the resources we have to reach as many students as efficiently as possible?” In devising a solution, Cisco knew it needed to align 14 classrooms in seven schools across three large geographic areas. Immediately, collaboration products were introduced, but what was missing was something that could tie them all together.
Cisco’s CADI team entered the picture early in the conversation and helped shape the direction in planning and designing a solution. It used Webex Teams as the central platform, creating a place for instantaneous communication between remote teachers and students. Other collaboration products were then integrated to facilitate classroom learning, including multiple Cisco TelePresence MX800 systems.
To initiate a class, the CADI team built a custom application that would allow teachers to log in using a single button on a connected touchpad. The application then would initiate the call between three MX800 systems (one in a teacher’s studio and one in each of two other classrooms) and create a Webex Teams meeting, connecting all rooms and devices through video in which the classroom lesson would be taught. Through Webex Teams, the teacher could then share lesson materials and other supporting documents while students could engage with the teacher when they had questions (or even follow up after class).
The solution was a huge hit and led to the development of additional custom bots and applications, outlined in the next example.
