Physical to Digital – Transforming Your Higher Education into Digital University

The current global crisis is seeing universities around the world attempting to restore learning and teaching, by leveraging powerful and interactive educational technology. With physical campuses being shuttered, higher education institutions have been forced to relocate to distributed, online learning platforms. But in this whirl of big change, some learning centers may have forgone a well-coordinated and structured approach to digitisation. From specialised online content to innovative student learning experiences, to strong support for administrators and faculty, universities should, and must, plan well for their digital transformation.

Camu, a leading cloud-based, mobile-first solution, has outlined 7 comprehensive stages that will help your university transition from a digital newcomer to an advanced institution.

1. Build the Right Virtual Environment
The first step in building a digital university is to foster a conducive environment for digital learning; namely, the ecosystem of people and technology, and how they interact with one another. Universities must invest in sound digital infrastructure which enables all stakeholders to switch seamlessly. A number of hardware and software issues must be addressed before remote learning can really take flight.

Camu enables higher education institutions to take their academic and administrative processes online. Through digital assets and innovative tools such as Virtual Classroom, Learning Management System, Student Information System, Analytics, e-Wallet and Smart-ID, Camu offers a ‘total digital campus’.

2. Imbibe Staff with Digital Skills
A very important consideration in setting up a digital university is determining faculty digital literacy and training requirements. From course design and scheduling to course delivery and correction, teachers must have the relevant skills to successfully navigate a digital campus. It’s important to assess the preparedness of teachers, but equally important to ascertain their apprehensions for the future. So yes, you might have the infrastructure and technology in place, but if your faculty is unable to adapt to this big change, it defeats the entire purpose.

Luckily, Camu offers a simple, stress-free solution to all academicians. Now, teachers can access all important information on one unified platform, take relevant actions with ease, communicate on the go, provide instant feedback, and more! What differentiates Camu is the fact that it does not require extensive training and can be easily operated by people who are new to tech.

3. Onboard Students Efficiently
Along with faculty digital literacy, universities must also be able to gauge student flexibility and adaptability to newer models of learning. Additionally, one must consider whether they have access to smart phones and computers, and high-speed internet. In addressing student centric concerns and fears, universities can develop specific solutions to mitigate each problem, without which building a digital university would be futile.

Camu tackles these challenges with a simple model and design that provides students with personalised safe and secure multi-channelled experiences. The powerful platform doesn’t require high internet bandwidth to run on, ensuring students can access the app wherever they are. From online admissions to online enrolment and payment, choices in subjects, class timings and lecturers, student academic journeys are a breeze.

4. Achieve Synergy Through Leadership
It’s important to have the right technology but it’s equally important to have the right leadership systems. If higher education is to fully seize the opportunities offered by a virtual campus, it must be willing to think beyond traditional roles and incumbents, academic structures and schedules. It must have a clear sense of direction, for which setting long term objectives and attainable goals, is a must. The digital economy does not conform to archaic rules, and higher education, too, needs to inculcate this agile thinking into its culture and processes.

Camu equips institutions with a future-oriented perspective, backed up with intuitive technology that is easy to steer. The multi-faceted platform enables management, faculty, students and parents to effectively engage with one another, to set and achieve higher standards of learning.

5. Create Engaging Content
Not all aspects of the physical learning environment can be digitised, for e.g. chemistry or biology experiments. Similarly, holding classroom interest for long durations is easier in a face-to-face scenario. To address this, universities must create unique, relevant and engaging content that anchors and guides curriculums. In a traditional setting, teachers can gauge the mood of the room and come up with spontaneous methods to increase receptiveness. In a virtual setting, however, these activities need to be embedded into the system beforehand.

Luckily, Camu Virtual Classroom offers an incredible immersive and interactive environment, wherein teachers can use a variety of multi-media tools, quizzes and polls to monitor student attention and make content more interesting.

6. Utilise Analytics and Metrics
One of the important drivers of student and institutional success is data analysis. Apart from providing actionable insights into the quality of teaching and learning, it also pinpoints specific areas that require immediate course correction and educational trends that should be leveraged.

Camu provides institutions with the right set of digital tools to mine data for insights, create comprehensive reports and improve learning outcomes. This results in continuous improvement throughout the semester, rather than end-of-semester initiatives.

7. Ensure Complete Data Security and Privacy
When undertaking such a huge task of building a digital university, the security and privacy of student data must be prioritised. With cyber-attacks being a regular feature, administrators and faculty must utilise protective technology to safeguard sensitive student information.

8. Enhancing Student Experience in the Digital Space
In the digital university, it’s crucial to create interactive and engaging learning experiences that go beyond traditional classroom practice. This could include gamified learning modules, collaborative projects, and discussion forums. Incorporating these interactive aspects can transform the learning environment into a more enjoyable and memorable one, thereby enhancing student engagement and retention.

9. Ensuring Digital Equity
As universities transition to digital platforms, it’s important to ensure that all students have equal access to learning resources. This includes not only access to devices and high-speed internet but also learning materials in various formats to cater to different learning styles and needs. Deploying an advanced Learning Management Solution for Higher Ed coupled with a College Information Management System that could be accessed by the students over a variety of devices including mobile phones, such as Camu Digital Campus, would help towards this. Universities could consider partnerships with tech companies or government bodies to provide resources for students who might otherwise be left behind in the digital shift.

Camu has been engineered to be multi-tenant, sharing its hardware with highly secured data privacy at the core. It can host millions of transactions per day, serving all stakeholders, whilst ensuring each microservice is deployed independently. Which means, data gets passed on only to the concerned hands. This is just the tip of the iceberg of digitisation. As universities begin to develop their own digital trademarks and USPs, what began as a short-term response to a crisis could well turn into an enduring revolutionary transformation of the higher education space.