The latest challenge that the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown to the world has overturned the business as usual criteria of all sectors globally. Most of them have shifted to remote learning almost instantaneously, and organizations are also suddenly dealing with monetary challenges as the national and worldwide economy may now face what looks to be a downturn. The purpose of this white paper is to present mutual IT challenges in the education industry faced by teachers while struggling to participate in technology in the classroom and propose possible solutions to those glitches. Inspection of these matters should be valuable to present and future professors, institute superintendents, and educational technology investigators.

Click here to download the IT Challenges In The Education Industry

Education is fundamental in acquiring knowledge, values, skills, beliefs, and moral Habits. The quote rightly says: “Education is the key to success in life, and teachers make a lasting impact in the lives of their students” ~ Solomon Ortiz.

This coronavirus pandemic has shut the schools across the world and has resulted in the rise of online education in which the teaching is done remotely on online platforms. This has led to a rise in the usage of online video conferencing tools, virtual tutoring, or online learning software in this pandemic.

Remote Learning – For the coming academic year, remote learning students enrolled will have the same course, and they will be accountable for daily assignments, courses, grading, projects, and assessment the same as them on campus.

How is the education sector responding to COVID-19?

As of 27 July 2020, approximately 1.725 billion learners are currently affected due to school closures in response to the pandemic. According to UNICEF monitoring, 106 countries are currently implementing nationwide closures and 55 are implementing local closures, impacting about 98.6 percent of the world’s student population.

Remote Learning –

Students are learning remotely by communicating with the instructor, attending classes remotely, watching lectures online via various video tools, participating in discussions via voice thread and online chats. Also, students are able to give quizzes online and submit the assessment.

Cybersecurity Loopholes –

The COVID-19 has key cybersecurity problems across the world.  Scammers are firing tailored phishing cloud security and scams to hunt and prey on educational organizations. Hackers are also targeting educational portals and unemployment payments. Ransomware attacks are getting higher and smarter for targeting critical learning and teaching IT infrastructure and other related E-learning businesses as the remote work has also given them a new horizon for better transitioning and targeting fragile platforms.

Education communities in the USA had already significant security flaws. They sometimes lack funding and skilled key personnel to monitor 24/7 and improve cybersecurity defense checks.

Thus, many universities and schools make basic infrastructure system errors keeping old vulnerabilities uncompensated which in turn keeps a welcoming door open for serial hackers and scammers.

Are you concerned about the potential leakage of confidential information internally or externally?

With the cost-effective and strategy-focused approach, “vTech ImmunITy Package” provides a comprehensive portfolio of solutions for education institutions.

You’re not vulnerable anymore.

It’s important to manage Cyber Risk for research and higher education, and helping schools and universities to network for responsive teaching is our main goal.

Security vigilance, diligence, and security hygiene should be put at priority. The faculty and staff should be given prime training with appropriate precautions and diligence to have a reduced cyber risk.

As this pandemic has thrust online digital remote learning, we can help you create a virtual environment that is safe and cost-efficient with our education package.

Give The Most Engaging and Secure Online Learning Experience to Your Students

 Our ImmunITy Education Package consists of:

•             Network and Endpoint Security

•             Virtual Distance Learning Solutions

•             All-Inclusive E-Learning Platform

•             Tailor-Made Collaboration Tools

•             Cloud Migration

For more information, schedule a demo or talk to us

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AI-driven tools are up for not only helping chatbots but also providing predictive analytics to prepare for incident management, demand planning, etc. The IT self-service desk is not a new element. However, in the “new normal” era, its usage is becoming more sophisticated since IT help desk chatbots and intelligent search recommendations guide users to the right services/solutions. In fact, experts say AI will be a key component of the help desk service in the coming years. The main advantage of using AI for the help desk and IT support is that it can eliminate the manual overhead required for the low-level service desk tasks. Hence, it allows employees to invest their time on higher valued tasks. vTech Solution, Inc. as an organization, believes AI-enabled help desk chatbot software has helped its clients in three major categories – chatbots, information gathering, and incident/request management. How AI is helping the help desk today?

1. Chatbots

A key area where AI capabilities are used at their optimum level is providing an automated chatbot experience for users 24/7. It means, there’s always someone who is available to answer your queries. IT support experts are willing to deploy IT help desk chatbots since they tend to not just apply NLP (natural language processing) to attend simple and repetitive queries and requests before forwarding complex issues to a live IT support personnel. Chatbot capabilities are extended to also perform tasks such as reset passwords, deploy software, modifications to restore IT services, etc. Take a look at the infographic below to know more about how chatbots benefit your remote employees.

2. Escalate requests and incident management

AI now plays a key role in automated categorization, setting priorities, and routing of incident and service tickets. Through predictive analytics, some of the fields of the form in a ticket get populated automatically. AI tools also recommend to prioritize incidents, classify the information into groups, and even assign the ticket! However, that does not mean that human work is eliminated here. An employee can override these suggestions, but AI assistance helps them to work faster and saves time in taking efforts of implementing obvious actions. Also read - The Rise of AI in Recruitment

3. Information gathering

An interesting capability of artificial intelligence help desk products is knowledge management. They apply an intelligent search function which not only relies on specific keywords but also understands their context and meaning. AI-powered service desk recommends solutions based on what has or has not worked before with past users. There are even intelligent auto-responders that reply to emails sent by users with the most relevant solutions. The tools also help to identify loopholes in the information database. AI-driven knowledge curation can not only help users but also IT personnel as well. The tools help to study past and present incidents, problems, modifications, errors, etc. and formulate them to come up with the most suitable solution for the IT service desk agents. Coming Up The next wave of AI capabilities will commence having more process and social analytics into the core system, along with flexible dashboards that help IT support agents to gain information on the current scenario. AI tools will also be able to identify issues and provide automated solutions for network alerts, security-related notifications, etc. In the future, AI’s focus in the help desk will be on voluminous tasks with low-importance, which are processed manually at present with costs incurred. It will also offer insights into large data sets that help in better decision making. In the future of IT support, organizations will look for new opportunities to automate and provide  proactive management of their working environment. Small businesses, especially, will be the first users of AI tools to automate or enhance support functions. Revamping the conventional help desk, vTech’s revolutionary IT help desk solutions are integrated with AI help desk agents which are fully equipped to handle various support requests with speed and accuracy. Want more information? Let’s talk As mentioned earlier in the article, AI capabilities will explore how chatbots can be used in various areas, check out the below infographic to understand how chatbots help remote employees improve their productivity.

COVID-19 has changed the face of recruiting overnight now that the companies are facing new challenges.

Companies across the world have struggled and are still struggling with the revenue goals, layoffs, and also new hiring amidst the pandemic. Recruitment Cycle has definitely impacted and given many challenges to the Recruiters, Talent Sourcers, Recruitment Coordinators, Account Managers, Interviewers, HR Professionals, and On-boarding team, leading to a failure in the workforce planning and reframing of HR policies.

HR Professionals are struggling hard with challenges like Mental Health & Well-being, Managing Remote Work, Employee Productivity, Lack of Agility, Employee Engagement, and Lack of Two-way Communication.

vTech focuses on quality talent acquisition with a contract, contract-to-hire, and Direct Permanent Staffing across all disciplines. We bridge the gap by analyzing, identifying, and fulfilling the staffing needs of organizations with highly qualified, sustainable professionals. We have extensive experience and successful past performance in providing staffing solutions.

The recruitment process has changed and will be changing after this pandemic; here are key strategies that can help HR professionals build their recruiting pools harnessing their teams through this uncertainty and pandemic time:

1. Reframing and Assessing talent management strategies

COVID-19 is a vital time to recheck and reframe your current recruitment strategies. It is very important to attract the right candidates in the organization, so ask these questions. Do you have any current problems with recruitment? Is your HR budget insufficient? Inspect your current recruiting practices and seek ways to improve it.

• Review the existing workforce. Analyze what skills you need post-COVID-19. Run out skills evaluations and put efforts into reducing the skills gap.
• Reframe and revise the current job description (JD) in job postings, team charts, and start to inhibit dynamic working habits.
• Analyze the recruitment cycle to improve sourcing, screening, interviewing, and onboarding phases.
• Start using technologies to innovate and improve your hiring process as candidate experience is very important
• Revise and reframe HR policies to make room for remote teams

2. Tailor your current talent technologies

Start using technology to streamline your recruitment cycle.

Using software and tools such as Microsoft teams to attract candidates and stay connected by taking virtual interviews. Pilot running before the actual virtual interviews is very important to steer clear of from technical glitch.

3. Strengthening the talent strategy virtually

In the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations should take care of their employees. Human resources professionals have faced uncertainty which they might have never imagined. They are trying to cope up with the challenges that COVID-19 has brought on them and they had to build and reframe talent management strategies for current employees and candidates.

• Managing Remote work – Leading and managing remote work may be challenging so exhibiting a clear plan for maintaining communication with each member of the team is a very essential and vital part and two-way communication should be practiced.

Gartner HR Survey Reveals 41% of Employees Likely to Work Remotely at Least Some of the Time Post Coronavirus Pandemic

• Employee orientation- Onboarding, managing new hires remotely, and training newbies organizing refresher training are all a part of human resource management, which has been the most challenging.

• Mental Health & Well-being- The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the mental health and wellbeing of employees; meanwhile the talent team here comes into the picture and the employees can be advised to create and maintain a routine and schedule and they do not forget to include periodic breaks.

• Employee experience & work-life integration – Talent acquisition strategy plays a major role in employee experience, work-life integration & effectiveness which are driven by a set of employee experience factors and talent team should be focusing on rapid reskilling, changing leadership and management competences, & culture of trust, transparency, and openness.

COVID-19 has gifted opportunities to the organizations for workplace innovation and finding the right, simpler, and inexpensive ways for HR operations.

vTech’s workforce solutions have definitely provided justice to the staffing industry and operations by successfully hiring new employees. vTech helps avoid the overwhelming task of posting job offers, looking through resumes, and laboring the tiring interview process. Our staffing solutions will allow you to elude those tasks and place topnotch, high-caliber professionals in the position you need to fill.