Video-Accelerated Digital Transformation of Education Across Canada

Students prefer remote learning. 

According to a survey by Digital Learning Pulse, more than two-thirds of students would consider taking at least one online course. That’s twice as many as pre-Covid.

Will this dramatic new trend continue after the pandemic abates? And if so, what other changes in education might we see post-Covid?

Before COVID, about 1/3 of higher ed students took at least one course, at least partially online. COVID-19 radically accelerated that trend. Based on a recent study, nearly 73% of students want to take one course or more online.

This shift has forced a whole series of changes that go right to the heart of how educational institutions operate, including how students are recruited, how faculty is trained, how knowledge is shared, and how students are taught.

1. 1. Convenience – improving content for students and educators. For years, access to curriculum was limited to locations where teachers were present. Now, this curriculum can be extended to any location. In Canada, most students learn Metropolitan French rather than Quebecois French. With digital transformation of the classroom, a Quebecois speaker can teach students across Canada virtually, so they can at least learn the accent or get some sense of Quebecois French (while struggling to do so in physical classrooms due to lack of teachers).

    

   2. Availability – providing more broadly available educational content. Content is now available anytime, anywhere, 24/7. Students can go back to classroom content to review concepts and pick up on material they may have missed the first time.

    

   3. Flexibility – addressing the needs of each student. To the degree that we’re stuck in a model of content and interactivity that must happen inside a physical classroom, we’re limiting ourselves in what we can do. Once you get beyond that heuristic, all kinds of things are possible. Students who move around a lot, require a smaller setting, or prefer a virtual experience, are now better served by video technologies.

    

   4. Scalability – supporting a drastic shift in needs of students and educators. The immediateness in which everyone moved educational environments from physical to online demonstrated the power of the cloud. Overnight, the demand for cloud-based tools skyrocketed, as cloud-based technologies truly enabled everyone to switch to virtual overnight.

    

   5. Elasticity – delivering quick, streamable services.  One area we saw the biggest growth in after the pandemic was in our streaming services. Of course, there’s no longer an in-person computer lab that you can go to. We were able to work with a lot of schools and be able to provide them very quickly with services that they could stream directly to their students.

    

   6. Predictability – using data to help educators understand what drives student success.  Institutions are building comprehensive strategies to aggregate data from virtual learning contexts and use it to derive insights about student and educator performance more effectively. We’re in a place where you can now aggregate data from multiple systems, many of which in the learning space are emitting the telemetry on a standardized format called IMS Caliper or on a format called xAPI, which allows us to derive powerful insights about what behavior drives successful outcomes for students and educators.

    

   7. Efficiency –digital transformation is driving operational efficiency. Schools can now better support remote staff and faculty and achieve more streamlined communications thanks to AI and machine learning. Education systems use these tools to run more efficiently, adapt quickly, and provide innovative learning environments.  And across campus, universities can automate tasks, from predicting demand at dining halls to extracting text for researchers.

The Covid-19 pandemic multiplies the demand for digital tools to ensure continuity of educational delivery. When educators struggled to deliver various learning experiences at scale effectively (synchronous, asynchronous, remote, and hybrid), Kaltura was able to offer robust video technology solutions to meet their needs.

Kaltura was recently awarded by CANARIE via an RFP process to be the Education Video Cloud provider for educators across Canada. The agreement enables institutions nationwide to access a best-in-class Virtual Classroom, Web Conferencing, and Video Platform designed for educators and learners.