When education and technology merge, it’s good. When it increases the efficiency of obtaining knowledge, it is even better. It seems that the time of traditional school boards, long and boring pairs are going away. And the teacher’s speech is replaced by the dreaded word “gamification”. Part of the blame for this lies with cloud services. How have they changed their approaches to learning?
The clouds have led users to several advantages:
- you can now work from any device;
- don’t think about data loss;
- learn remotely;
- involve any number of people in training;
- speed up data collection and processing
- and much more.
Why should the cloud be used in education? This, of course, is not the area where they are fundamentally important. But the principles that work in customer service apply here as well. By the way, cloud storage is one of the popular networking topics for presentation for students. So draw your knowledge below.
EDUCATION AT SCHOOL OR UNIVERSITY
Perhaps the most extensive sphere of acquiring new knowledge is that of educational institutions. Off-line education hasn’t disappeared – it’s still the same courses, schools, universities, and pieces of training.
For example, it is easier for a teacher to collect completed homework, test results, or track work in real-time with the help of services. Even now quite a few teachers are using email services for these purposes, but the potential of the cloud does not end there. Any writemyessays company may provide the completed order to the customer in a cloud service. There it will be secured and quickly accessed.
Examples of the use of cloud technology in large organizations include:
- electronic diaries and journals;
- personal offices for students and teachers;
- an interactive reception area;
- information exchange between students;
- distance learning;
- test administration;
- storage of learning files or past work;
- simulators;
- libraries;
- collaborative work on learning projects;
- Creation of study schedules;
- tracking learning progress.
SELF-EDUCATION
This area could be mentioned separately. This broad segment of the market already has specific directions. For example, Duolingo and LinguaLeo are the leaders in language learning.
But, if it is more important for schools to structure the information, then independent learning has long been a trend to embellish distance learning games. The above-mentioned language services are just trying to captivate the student by passing levels, characters, points, and puzzles.
Although there are supporters of the classical approach – in the person of Memrise and WordDive.
CONFERENCES AND WEBINARS
In addition to learning languages through exercises and simulators, you can find more advanced mechanisms. Conferences and webinars have long been used to transfer and absorb knowledge.
Web conferences have a lot of applications – teaching or tutoring, real-time group work, or a webinar that allows participants to discuss a topic at the same time. You just need to choose the best service. For small groups there are the traditional Skype, Hangouts, Join.me. Slightly more opportunities are in ClickMeeting, TrueConf Online.
Of course, the choice depends on the objectives of the instructor and the needs of the students. Some will be satisfied with screen sharing, while others will need a whiteboard, quizzes, and presentations.
There are professional platforms like Adobe Connect, Saba, Cisco WebEx on the market, but they may seem overly cumbersome and expensive.
STAFF TRAINING
When a new employee joins a company, he needs to learn the knowledge base. It helps to get up to speed more quickly, learn the ins and outs, and avoid asking unnecessary questions of colleagues and supervisors. Some knowledge is stored in the heads of the team, while prudent teams have it in the cloud. At least in Google Docs, a management system, or Confluence. For companies whose employees work remotely around the world, such as cheap essay writing services, timely training is critical. The quality of services provided depends on the speed at which employees are trained.
Someone starts to present it interactively. To do this, they use the services already mentioned above, including TrueConf Online and iSpring Online, and there are also specialized ones like Moodle, Versal, and ServiceGuru.
But if in the previous cases people are able to set up automation themselves, it is not always possible to build the same process in companies, especially those with more than 100 employees. To implement, configure and integrate systems, you have to turn to agencies and integrators.
Suppose you train your employees. Your tasks are often solved by training, personal conversations, and installing some sophisticated software on the company’s server. But this process is simplified as well.
Compared to solutions for schools, corporate training will require somewhat different statistics, but also need certificates and testing. Another thing you need to consider is the option of moving the service to your domain, branding, and function of selling ready-made courses. Some teams may well make money on this, or just share their experiences. This helps companies to test, complement the skills of employees, improve their level and at the same time help their colleagues.
CUSTOMER TRAINING
In Runet, you can already find a couple of services that help create interactive instructions for users.
The functions of such ready-made solutions:
- all the code fits into a few lines;
- cues can be edited directly on the site, it can be done by any professionals;
- tips work equally well on the front-end and backend;
- different types of cues can be created for different groups of users;
- no need to install the software.
For example, Hintarea offers a demo as an extension for Chrome. It allows you to see what the tooltips will look like on the site. Tooltips can be added to any element on the site. Tooltips can be broken down into steps by setting the desired ranking in the list. Cues help create tours of the site, users can get to know unfamiliar and complex systems faster.
From all of the above, we can conclude that clouds save time and money for specific people and companies.
