03 Feb
Benefits of social intranet for schools, higher education, and colleges
What is the need for Intranets in education departments?
The global pandemic has caused tremendous disturbances in everyone’s lives. Sudden lockdown closed all educational institutes and, students got stuck at home with limited or no access to learning with all chaos and confusion around assuming learning to be lost for a longer period. The pandemic compelled educational systems to create opportunities to reshape school learning to a new model that is more flexible and robust.
Intranet software not just provides a secure, fast, and reliable channel of communication, but also helps schools or colleges to meet their own set of challenges.
With the social intranet feature to advantage, education departments can create a single platform to collaborate, share information, contribute to success and productivity.
What is Social Intranet?
Social intranets have taken the world of employee engagement and communication by storm. With distributed workforces, flexible working, hybrid work culture being the new norm, it is amazing to know that a social intranet is the epicenter of the workplace. The social features of the modernized intranet – such as instant messaging, activity feeds, forums, likes, shares, emojis, comments, and more – have been shown to enhance culture, boost collaboration, and add to employee experience.
At a time when the education department faces emerging challenges that threaten to change the face of future education, prioritizing digitalization and introducing modern intranet worked as a savior.
How Social intranet benefits schools, higher education, and colleges
1. Enhancing Collaboration and Communication
Effective Communication is the powerhouse of any educational institution. Due to remote operations, it is difficult for everyone to be engaged and motivated. Good internal communications keep students, teachers, and staff informed and notified of an institution’s mission, nurturing a positive culture and sense of belonging. A social intranet offers new probabilities for engaging students with intuitive internal comms features. Digital content features like videos, text, and widgets help to present any information quickly and give content creators limitless options to encourage learning.
Everyone can participate in the conversation, either through content creation, like, share, Q&A, @mentions, commenting, and more.
2. Knowledge Sharing
In the prevailing new learning environment, the students are compelled to proceed with their education virtually from home. Resulting in a lot of struggle due to lack of engagement, inadequate knowledge on any task, and communication gap.
With the advent of the social intranet, teachers can share important information, and everyone will have greater access to information to act more quickly. They can make better decisions quickly with the right knowledge at a fingertip.
Students and teachers can share knowledge and ideas paired with artifacts to make learning more intuitive and easier to understand.
Additionally, it will also connect students to subject matter experts for guidance and cater to clear doubts on any subject with ease.
It includes discussion forums, internal news, surveys, calendars, ideation platform, and best practices. Using the ideation feature schools, colleges and universities can crowdsource ideas, recognize potential challenges, and uncover solutions in a natural user-friendly method.
3. Centralizing resources
A social intranet strives to centralize all content, information, and knowledge on a single platform. Teachers and staff can upload learning resources, notes, and all valuable information. And share information about projects or task status they are currently working on, supporting feedback and discussion. All of these are backed by a robust cognitive enterprise search tool that makes information discoverability easy and personalized according to everyone’s role, interest, language, and department. Students and teachers will instantly and effortlessly source highly relevant data and information, amplifying productivity and saving time.
The social intranet with single-sign-on synchronization provides a gateway to all-important apps eliminates multiple logins and several open apps.
4. Fostering Engagement
The old traditional intranet was earlier used fundamentally as a hub to store documents and resources for teaching. Today, the modern intranet has come a long way with AI making inroads. The key is increasing the user adoption rate, bolstering engagement with the ease for teaching staff and students to upload information, assure information is relevant and up to date and most important anyone can share content with those who need it.
They can join live discussion groups, quizzes, and access information in real-time from anywhere, transforming into a collaborative workspace. Having an effective virtual learning environment is indispensable to fortify the work that takes place in the classroom. The intranet encourages engagement through the constant touch of lecturers and their classmates with all flexibility and ease.
5. Increases Productivity
In all educational institutions, knowledge sharing is paramount. There is unconscious duplicate information, which minimizes performance and interest in studies.
Collaboration and communication get affected due to information silos, especially at challenging times. Here the social intranet creates a coherent academic community.
The socializing feature directs messages to the entire organization or any particular team or group, depending upon the needs more productively. It covers news, important updates, assigned files, peer recognition, reminders, alerts, and much more with added mobile functionality. Using the social intranet instead of email can ease the load on the inbox and heighten productivity.
Thus, social intranet works as the best productivity tool for schools, colleges, and institutions to weather all challenges with its inbuilt social elements.
Conclusion:
Educational institutes are hesitant about embracing new technology. As organizations have evolved, the intranet is considered to be the best tool to strengthen education with its updated and advanced features. Integrated social intranets in the education sector magnify the students and faculty communication with lot more added benefits. It simplifies all the processes and gives a prolific experience. According to Forbes, the best social intranet is not the one providing the most social features, but the one which ties the most business processes and data to employee’s social behavior.
Want to know more about the social intranet. Explore Mesh to see how your organization will benefit from the best social intranet platform.
Poonam Chug is AVP - SaaS Strategy & Business. She has worked in various areas, right from designing and executing sales & account management strategies to reengineering digital workplace solutions. With her determined focus on our mission and progressive approach, she has achieved customer delight in the space of AI, Knowledge Mining, Content & Collaboration, Virtual Assistants, RPA and more. Backed with a deep understanding of customer needs and technology, she leads the SaaS business unit with an upshot of maximizing revenue while ensuring customer satisfaction.
Poonam Chug