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With over 1.5 million students in the Middle East and Africa leveraging on Microsoft Teams, an online platform, to sustain learning during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the safety of learners has become a major concern too.
Angela Nganga, Microsoft Education lead for Africa, Levant and Pakistan said in a recent statement that ensuring secure collaboration is important to digital learning.
Nganga quoted Nelson Mandela, South African activist and former president 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.
It is estimated that 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, there has been a massive shift towards remote learning. This has meant a 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.
Read also: Microsoft Paper outlines steps to drive Nigeria’s digital transformation
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 unauthorised users have gained access to virtual classrooms.
This month, there was 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.
She said when educators set up meetings to teach students a link is created which participants can use to enter these meetings. Sharing these links online to reach students can seem like a quick and easy way to communicate with students when and how to enter live meetings but this also opens meetings up to anyone who sees the link, she said.
Nganga suggested that to ensure safe meeting of educators and students while learning online, administrators need to create identities (or profiles) for each student and teacher which requires them to log into the tool to join the meeting. Within Teams administrators can thereafter choose to turn off the ability for anonymous users to join the meeting by changing it within the meeting policies.
Within meetings, educators can also make sure that all students are present in the classroom and that there are no unexpected attendees by selecting “show participants” in the meeting controls giving them greater control over who is admitted into the lesson, she said.
Other functionalities such as being able to blur video backgrounds, mute participants, and control who can present during the meeting are important to ensuring safe learning for students with Teams.
