Maduka Nweke
Over 1.5 million students and teachers in the Middle East and Africa Emerging markets alone are leveraging Microsoft Teams as the remote learning platform during this COVID-19 pandemic period.
Microsoft Education Lead for North, West, East and Southern Africa, Levant and Pakistan countries, Angela Nganga, who said this in a statement, added that ensuring secure collaboration is important to digital learning.
Nganga quoted South African activist and former president Nelson Mandela, who said “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. “Investment in education is one of the biggest investments any country can make for its current and future generation.
“Currently, around 420 million people across the world would be lifted out of poverty with secondary education, consequently improving the quality of life globally by more than half.”
Today, as more and more people across the African continent are required to stay home due to government lockdown interventions, we are seeing a massive shift towards remote learning. This has meant the growth in the usage of collaborative tools such as Microsoft’s Teams to create virtual classrooms wherein educators can communicate with their students in real-time.
Nganga said through such platforms, educators could connect with and support students in much the same way they could in person with live meetings wherein they are able to show video, share presentations, and even invite external speakers for virtual field trips.
But, as students and educators move online, naturally there is an increase in the risks to security and safety, she said. “As we adjust to the new normal and governments take the much needed next steps towards safely re-opening the economies and adopting possible return to school strategies, blended learning will play a key role in ensuring that some of the non – essential aspects of learning that do not require face to face interaction are enabled while ensuring the online safety and security of students.”
She said educational institutions, therefore, need to take steps to ensure that digital learning environments are safe by setting up concrete policies and restrictions when using these tools to guard students’ safety, while also ensuring that online classrooms remain engaging and giving educators the tools they need to create a focused learning environment.
Restricting access to meetings, she said could safeguard students. There have already been multiple occurrences around the world wherein unauthorized users have gained access to virtual classrooms. “Just this month alone we’ve seen an online graduation ceremony interrupted with racial slurs by hackers, last month a man gained access to an online class and exposed himself and another online lecture was interrupted by playing audio of inappropriate content.”