Everyone from grade school students to college attendees got a big dose of e-learning this year. Many schools still continue to operate with a partially remote operation to ensure the safety of students and faculty. The lessons learned through this transition to online learning are insurmountable. We know how tough it can be to teach a classroom of students at any age, let alone from home with all students attending class via computer. If they show up, great, but that doesn’t even begin to speak to the efficacy of the learning experience in this pandemic world in which we’re living.
Like many transitions in the wake of COVID-19, education departments around the country accelerated their push to cloud hosting and remote operations faster than planned. Online learning is a big component of colleges, but even those programs faced a higher bandwidth of students than anticipated. The quick response to adapt to the pandemic put cloud hosting on display for all educational institutions and districts, and the future is bright if these technologies continue to play an important role in the learning process.
Challenges to Online Learning That Cloud Hosting Can Solve
Colleges, aside, the main challenge experienced via online learning growing pains occurred at the K-12 level. In fact, it continues to play out as schools continue operating with partially or completely remote classrooms. Security is the first and foremost interest of school districts administering virtual classrooms to students. These online video chatrooms need to not only ensure stable connections for all attending class but also require careful encryption so the students, who are minors, are safe. Cloud hosting has proven to be the best way to address security concerns for parents and teachers.
With cloud technologies, a virtual classroom can provide better connections to students regardless of their internet speeds. Likewise, cloud encryption is the safest way to ensure students are in private, impenetrable classrooms. Despite the early weeks of the pandemic providing countless headaches for administrators, many school districts were shocked to find that adopting a cloud hosting plan for their online operations was easy.
What Does Cloud Hosting mean for a Post-Pandemic Educational Experience?
Students and teachers aren’t quite reunited again in all parts of the country. In fact, many states have school districts less than 20 miles apart operating in completely different ways and manners. Let’s fast forward for a second, however, and talk about what happens after students return to the classroom. Where does cloud hosting fit into a traditional school experience? Well, for starters, parents of K-12 students will tell you that students didn’t suddenly start learning on a computer when their studies went remote. Laptops, tablets, and computer labs are essential tools to a modern learning environment.
With cloud computing resources now integrated into a school’s foundation, there are numerous benefits to keeping the services in place when everyone returns to the classroom. For example, virtualization provides the latest applications and interactive programs for students without the need to constantly upgrade hardware. Given the budgetary concerns of school districts facing the financial burden of handling COVID-19, this is an invaluable perk of cloud hosting technologies.
Not to mention, cloud hosting is providing school districts with the most secure online connections many have ever experienced. With traditional internet encryption likely standing as the only guard for schools in parts of the country, attackers could find ways into student data and important documents. The encrypted, secure nature of cloud services likely made many administrators cringe with the knowledge of how penetrable their past systems truly were. Returning to the outdated, often impractical style of incorporating technology in the classroom before COVID-19 is simply not an option.
A Better Education for our Children Awaits in the Cloud
The silver lining for the pandemic’s impact on education is that more school districts enlist cloud hosting services than ever before. The challenges of hosting server rooms and worrying about monitoring large intranet networks don’t make sense in 2021. Instead, cloud hosting services for schools can provide a better educational experience for all involved. With the challenges of COVID shifting from a public health focus to a financial focus in the recovery process, school districts will need to make tough decisions about the future of their operations.
Cutting programs will, unfortunately, be on the table, but cloud services have proven over the course of the past 11 months to be far too valuable to abandon. In fact, the cost of these services will likely save money in other places. That’s going to be a very important factor in what these schools look like in 2022 and beyond. Cloud hosting isn’t just about accessing the latest and greatest that technology can offer. It’s about ensuring the education all students deserve, no matter how or where they’re learning.
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