Students Will Begin University Degree Courses Remotely From September

In response to the ongoing threat of COVID-19, UK universities across the UK are having to re-evaluate how they will be conducting classes both today and into the foreseeable future. To date, they have already cancelled all non-essential activities, including (and critically!) in-person on-campus teaching of classes. Moreover, many institutions are already proposing that all degree course teaching will be online from September, delaying face-to-face lectures and teaching to the second term, or as soon as campuses are able to open.

While most educational institutions have not traditionally invested in online education as a core aspect of their teaching experience, some higher education institutions have committed to building a fully digital online academic experience. No doubt, this current crisis will accelerate this trend.

This is a unique and complicated challenge for any university or college. There are many considerations when moving to a 100% remote learning environment, especially with such an uncertain timeline. However, one solvable but extremely critical piece of the puzzle is ensuring that universities have the right underlying IT in place to support a remote student body and faculty.

Unfortunately, many schools do not have a great infrastructure or the resources to build a solid, secure and robust network that’ll be required to support thousands of students and staff suddenly requiring access to the university’s plethora of servers, applications, etc.

Until this current crisis, institutions have never needed their IT networks to support an entire remote student body. Attending a remote lecture or taking an online exam requires a consistent, stable network performance. But the influx of tens or thousands of remote users in September can and will create significant stresses and bottlenecks on a university’s network, degrading application performance and ultimately impacting student learning and staff productivity.

Next Generation Network Solutions

Syscomm can provide a next-generation network solution that can route traffic through a dedicated, SLA-driven Layer-2 private network, accelerating both on-premise and SaaS applications and providing consistently fast data, voice and video. All Syscomm’s network solutions also include access to a cloud portal that provides real-time visibility into the network and applications.

Our comprehensive network architecture allows colleges, universities, and research institutions to build secure, high-performance digital learning and research networks, enabling benefits that include:

  • Create and quickly implement new services and applications tailored to enhance the overall on and off-campus experience
  • Quickly and securely extend the reach of the campus
  • Protect data and privacy with robust security from the access edge to the core of the network
  • Reduce costs with simplified infrastructure deployment, management, and operations
  • Integrate easily into multivendor network environments
  • Accelerate and automate services to simplify IT operations
  • Deploy sophisticated wireless and wired networks with unprecedented visibility and control
  • Accelerate private, public, and SaaS cloud adoption initiatives

For students and faculty, this translates to a smooth, stable videoconferencing experience for lectures and quick, reliable access to applications and learning platforms. For a university’s IT department, Syscomm’s solutions simplify the network infrastructure, enhance remote access security and provide unprecedented end-to-end visibility into the network.

Advance Your Campus Network With Syscomm

The coronavirus continues to be a growing threat and practicing social distancing will remain for the foreseeable future. There is currently no clear timeline for when higher education campuses will be back to normal, so they need a solution that can be implemented today, but will also serve as a long-term solution that can adapt to their changing and unpredictable needs during these times of uncertainty. The need for hyper-reliable, easily managed network infrastructure has never been greater in higher education.

Syscomm can provide campuses with open, software-driven educational networking solutions that are agile, adaptive and secure to enable the digital transformation of education and improve learning outcomes by enabling emerging styles of technology-driven teaching including online testing, virtual and augmented reality, robotics, and flipped classroom.

Next Steps

We hope you found the above useful. If you have any questions, or would like some technical assistance when considering your network infrastructure, we’d be happy to discuss your requirements. Our door is always open, without obligation.

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