College Tutors Turn To VoIP For Parent Contact

Colleges and schools in Great Britain are using new technology to make teachers available at all times to parents of their students, as well as to other staff.

Educational establishments throughout the United Kingdom are seeing an improvement not only in their working efficiency, but they are also saving a lot of their valuable and tightly stretched budgets, by adopting Unified Communications alternatives such as Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP).

Unified Communications (UC) systems are being used already by various colleges across the country, such as Cardiff’s biggest College, Coleg Glan Hafren, The Richard Huish sixth form college in Somerset, and the massive Trafford College in Manchester.

The system is managed by a central ‘control cell’.

Telephones are placed in every teaching room and other locations throughout the establishment.

Every member of staff has their own number and, no matter where they are, they can log in to that particular phone and be reached by other staff members and even parents.

Trafford College in particular is seeing the benefits of communicating in this way.

It is spread over five sites and the previous cost of telephone calls between the sites was phenomenal.

With unified communications, (and the obviously cheaper VOIP), this cost is significantly reduced.

However, the Communications firm which supplies and installs these systems, Shoretel, is making almost 10% of its entire global staff redundant.

Despite the obvious increase in business due to so many establishments taking up the internal communication systems, Shoretel is cutting back for the sake of efficiency and cost-cutting, a move which is costing it half a million dollars.

Shoretel is expected to install systems in all educational establishments throughout the United Kingdom in the very near future