By ; Nahla Makled

Most governments around the world have temporarily closed educational institutions in an attempt to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and have mandated that schools and universities introduce distance learning programs. This has been the case in Egypt as well. In a short period of time, institutions have had to grapple with integrating information technology into their educational systems in order to provide a user experience consistent with classroom sessions. Post pandemic, we see there likely to be a hybrid model where online education will eventually become an integral component of school education. Educational systems will need to be more agile, flexible and technologically advanced.

Ahmed Fathy, Country Sales Lead, Egypt at HPE Aruba says, “Over the past two months while speaking to customers in the education space we find that their challenges start to sound similar to those of enterprise business customers; How do we bring students back to physical locations while maintaining social distancing? How do we engage students when online learning stretches into an extended timeframe? What are the resulting implications in how educators and planners prepare their education and technology plans to support these new learning models? These challenges are very stressful for stakeholders used to working with legacy technology.”

“Institutions have been radically disrupted and they will be looking to establish continuity, maintain security while in class or distance learning, enhance student engagements and have reliable high-performance connectivity that supports bandwidth hungry applications. Aruba understands these requirements and has devised technology that specifically addresses these pain points.”  

Aruba is currently working with educational institutions in Egypt to share new perspectives and trends as they emerge and enable new learnings. The company is playing an important role in helping these institutions re-envision the future of education and chart their journey post pandemic. Aruba is working to address their most critical technological needs and is channelizing its efforts towards few critical areas:

·                Physical Distancing Monitoring 

·                Contact Tracing 

·                Thermal Cameras & Video Analytics for fever detection

·                Touch-Less Operations

·                High Speed Outdoor Links 

·                Flexible Remote Connectivity

·                Extending SD-WAN to Public Clouds

·                Dynamic Segmentation

·                Unified Cloud Management

·                Proactive User Experience Monitoring

With online and hybrid leaning models becoming strategically important for institutions, reliable, high performance Wi-Fi across the campus is as critical as classroom connectivity. Aruba powers up networks using high performance wireless point-to-point connectivity with ease, thus extending the network to support on-demand applications, thermal screening, IoT cameras and other touchless entry devices.

“A smart university campus is likely to be the most complex mobility environment. With the company’s smart, simple and secure architecture, Aruba is able to manage and support thousands of users in a high-density environment and enables a reliable and superior always-on experience. Furthermore, with open architecture, our technology is able to integrate with any existing infrastructure that the customer may have.  Aruba is able to transform the e-learning experience with enhanced automation & analytics, ” continues Ahmed.

To help alleviate some of the current financial strain that institutions are facing today, the company, through HPE Financial Services (HPEFS), is offering IT financing solutions to address economic challenges. From helping release capital from existing infrastructures to deferring payments and providing pre-owned tech to relieve capacity strain, the company is helping institutions prepare for the future.

This forced and abrupt move to a hybrid mode of learning will not be easy. However, it can provide institutions with an opportunity to experiment and innovate. Piloting new approaches and building on practices that are proven to work can help create positive and enduring changes.

“Aruba will continue to support our education customers and partners in Egypt as they navigate these challenging times. We’re here to educate institutions on how technology can enable learning, create better student experiences, and streamline operations,” concludes Ahmed.