Educational hub

Educational hub for Russian regions

Objective

Solution

Business integrator CTI has implemented an educational hub based on Cisco equipment as part of a hybrid learning technology testing project. CTI has equipped and implemented Cisco solutions at four sites. Two of them have been set up as broadcast sources where teachers are present. The other two are remote classrooms with students and provide audio and video feedback capabilities. At the initial stage, the hub united the Russian Society ‘Knowledge’, the Yaroslavl State Technical University, Lyceum No. 86 in Yaroslavl and School No. 12 in Rybinsk, Yaroslavl Region.

The deployed hybrid learning system is based on the Cisco Webex remote interaction platform. Teachers and students located at the hub sites become participants within a single interactive educational environment. They can communicate and share data, interact in groups and organize polls, draw together, edit documents and discuss the results of their work. The project is scalable, with various options for equipping classrooms, depending on the format of the sites and their respective objectives.

An option of the Smart Meeting Room, Smart Auditorium, developed by CTI specifically for the educational hub project allows you to use all the possibilities of advanced video conferencing technologies in the classroom to increase the efficiency of online education. Automatic tracking of cameras to the active speaker ensures a dialogue with students, while installed cameras track the movement of the teacher in the classroom. This helps to achieve the effect of presence and attention during the educational process. A full-fledged discussion in online education is provided by the ‘hand raising’ capabilities, voting, polling and questionnaires. All Smart Auditorium systems are managed through integration with the proprietary CTI developed IoT Platform and voice assistants, in particular, Yandex.Alisa, and are carried out using voice commands.

Result

The key advantage of the solution was the availability of the service from anywhere, at any time, from any device, an easy way to plan and connect to an event that does not require additional knowledge in video conferencing, connecting up to 1000 students with interactive abilities, recording events and access to them.

According to the project plan, in a year, 24 events will be held with the help of the implemented infrastructure, organized by the Russian Society ‘Knowledge’ with at least 5,000 participants from all over the country. 150 IT teachers of the Yaroslavl region will undergo an advanced training at the Cisco Networking Academy, and at least 2,000 school students will receive consultations on preparation for the Unified State Exam (EGE) and Basic State Examination (OGE).