Distance Learning Expands with Webex Education Connector in Learning Management Systems

Over the past two months, the number of students and faculty using the Webex Education Connector has grown 770%.

In today’s educational climate, educators, students, and families have shifted to distance learning. With this journey, it’s critical for students and faculty to keep their passion for education alive, continue to interact, and leverage collaboration technology. Distance learning enables students to take classes anytime, participate anywhere, and provides access to educational resources. Cisco Webex offers vital tools and solutions to transform classroom learning to online learning.

“We enabled all courses to use Webex through Canvas with the Cisco Webex Education Connector. Instructors can schedule Webex Meetings with their students with just a few steps. Many of these instructors are teaching remotely for the first time and Canvas integration was essential in helping them smoothly transition. Instructors and students are enjoying easy access to Webex Meetings and Webex Teams directly inside of their Canvas course.”
– Aaron Axelsen, Operations Manager, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

Remote Learning Ease-of-Use Features

Cisco Webex Education Connector enables a seamlessly integrated experience directly within their learning management system (LMS) so educators and students do not have to navigate to different applications to get work done. During this time of transition, educators have actually increased their remote learning engagement and taken advantage of these ease-of-use features:

Instructors schedule virtual classes over Webex right within the LMS. Students simply click just one button to join the class.
Instructors can create messaging groups with students in each course right within the LMS.
The platform eliminates transitions between tools to allow students and educators to collaborate effortlessly.
While students and faculty are away from campus, they’re still able to fully access content for more productive sessions, and interactively share whiteboards and annotated content for increased creativity, brainstorming, and communication.
Class schedules have become more fluid so the ease-of-use in managing meetings and recordings is an essential feature to accommodate this flexibility.
Instructors can list their available office hours for students to schedule.

And that’s not all – check out the video for more Education Connector highlights:

Seamless LMS Integration

As you can see, the Education Connector seamlessly integrates powerful Webex collaboration features right inside your LMS platform. The currently supported platforms include:

Canvas by Instructure
Blackboard Learn and Blackboard Learn Ultra
D2L Brightspace
Moodle
Sakai

And there’s more! LMS administrators can choose which features the instructors can use creating a seamless experience for students across all instructors. Be sure to take advantage of these features right inside your LMS.

Shift in Learning

Education is changing. Look to Cisco to provide a simple, secure, reliable platform for distance learning and administrative collaboration that can be integrated right into your LMS. With the increased shift to distance learning the Education Connector usage has exploded.

“Today, more than 11,500 of our learners and teachers are using Webex Teams spaces inside of D2L Brightspace to teach, learn, and stay connected. With video, messaging, and file sharing, this new dimension of collaboration in our LMS has made our Institute’s move online much easier because it’s all in one place.”
-Scott Bury, CIO, Holmesglen Institute

More and more educators are finding the value of delivering instruction through our platform. Since the beginning of February, the number of teams created by instructors and students for each course has grown nearly 2,000%. As for usage increases, we are right there to support you, constantly improving performance, increasing speed, and enhancing support.

Bridge to Possible

From simplifying onboarding and adoption for new online instructors to providing a unified experience within the LMS, and from improving the web browser join meeting experience to centralizing and expanding administrative capabilities, we innovate to enable education. We believe that continuous collaboration while students and educators are physically separated is critical in these challenging times.

Connected learning just got easier.

How are you approaching distance learning? Join the conversation and keep an eye out for our next #EducationNow blog! Comment below and stay tuned for the next blog in our #PublicSectorNow series.