Secure collaboration tool for educational organizations
Communication for any educational organization, no matter whether this is a school, a higher educational establishment or an e-learning platform can pose challenges. Typical educational institution consists of various departments and subdivisions which normally have issues with their communication flow.
Very often information sharing process between different divisions faces data losses, switching between different communication channels, multiple forwarding to the person in charge, etc. To ensure that the information exchange process is smooth, it is not enough to develop communication culture. All communication should run in one secure collaboration tool which supports not only instant messaging but also allows sharing files, assigning tasks, and running video or voice meetings.
Internal communication with Virola corporate messenger
Properly built internal communication is an important part of educational organization management. While tutors and teachers can use external educational platforms to communicate with students, there is a necessity for smooth internal communication within the organization.
To make internal communication between departments and subdivisions of the educational institution smooth, efficient and secure it is necessary to use the right corporate messaging tool which supports the following features:
- Private communication between users
- Group communication for different departments and subdivisions
- Voice and video meetings - both private and group
- Unlimited files storage and permanent conversations history
- User permission roles
- On-premises hosting
This way all communication will be performed in one tool and users will have access to different chat groups where they will be able to share the necessary information. It is very convenient when it takes just a couple of clicks to send a message to all recipients at once instead of composing emails, filling in email addresses, and forwarding messages back and forth between different departments.
Online education with help of Virola collaboration tool
Virola has all necessary for online education features. Thus you can use Virola both for internal communication and for organizing online classes within your educational organization. For students it is possible to create restricted user profiles without permission to create new chat rooms. Such users can be added only to specific groups for their classes and to private communication rooms with tutors. And teachers with moderator permissions can manage their chat groups.
During online classes students and teachers can use the following features:
- Group chat rooms - to organize groups of students learning different subjects
- Video and audio meetings - for real-time lectures and seminars
- Screen sharing - to present learning material, illustrate information provided verbally
- Files sharing - to provide students with learning materials and assignments, and also to get completed assignments from students
- Text messages formatting - to structure information
- Task board - to make assignments and track their progress. Tasks on the board can be filtered by different criteria which makes it convenient to use for both teachers and students. While teachers can monitor assignments' progress in specific groups, students can find their own assignments for different subjects.
Additional features that may be useful for online learning workflow:
- Meetings scheduler - so that nobody misses a class
- Search in chat history - to reread instead of asking again
- User status and notification settings - to keep tabs on everything during the working / studying hours and have quiet after hours, free from notifications beeping
Moreover, your organization can have several isolated Virola servers for different subdivisions and your teachers can connect to all of them from the same client application. This can be useful when your organization has, for example, independent colleges, and you would like them to be totally separated and thus create different Virola servers which are hosted separately and have independent databases and sets of users. However, some of your teachers have classes in several colleges and thus need to connect to students from different Virola servers. They can use the Application Profiles tool to store their login details for each server and open each profile as a separate tab in Virola client.
Virola Corporate Messenger for e-learning
Impact of COVID pandemic on the educational market is evident. Online educational platforms have gained popularity since then allowing students getting knowledge remotely without leaving their homes. At the beginning everything was quite messy as different tools were used for online conferences and there were no standards for proper online educational environment. However, at present there are specific requirements to remote education and applications which can be used for online classes.
Some of the educational platforms have built in tools for communication. However, they are quite limited in functionality and almost none of them combine quality group audio / video calls with permanent messaging history, files storage and predefined groups of participants. Virola collaboration tool has everything your e-learning organization needs for smooth continuous communication process between teachers and students. And besides online conferencing features, it offers a task board, where teachers can create and assign tasks and students can attach their test papers or assignments and track their progress.
Thus, when you want to develop your own or upgrade an existing e-learning platform, there is no need to waste your time and money on developing a separate collaboration tool for students and teachers. You can use a secure self-hosted Virola Messenger which will satisfy all needs of your organization.
With help of Virola Messenger your educational organization can build effective communication between departments, smooth and efficient educational process and successful collaboration between all employees, teachers and students.
