Catalyst-EU Community

As the COVID virus continues to spread both globally and within the UK, many FE/HEIs and organisations are having to make decisions about working off site, closing campuses and offices and migrating communications and learning to online systems. This often creates a need to scale up those systems, both in technical terms and more importantly in terms of staff training and familiarity.

Catalyst can help in many ways at this time:

First of all our own business model means that many of our staff are full time remote workers, while all of our staff have that facility and our own internal systems are designed with this very much part of our day-to-day business. In fact, as of today, our Brighton head office is closed and all our staff are working remotely. Hopefully, as clients, you will notice very little difference - emails will be answered as normal, support tickets will be completed as normal. If you need to talk to someone face-to-face drop us an email and we'll set up a BigBlueButton web conference call.

For you and your users, it may mean scaling up your online provision - on our AWS hosted systems, that's a ticket request and can be achieved easily. If you need to discuss with us scaling up internally or physically hosted systems, we can have those discussions about how best we can support your IT infrastructure. If you need new or additional services - a new webconference tool, or to integrate it with your VLE, we can help. If you need advice on how to mitigate potential impacts to assessments and exams by not having large gatherings of students, we can discuss what suits your specific requirements.

Most importantly, if your staff need additional training and support to get online and transfer their normal teaching from face-to-face into the VLE, then we can arrange online training sessions. The most important advice though for anyone faced with this urgent situation is Keep It Simple! It takes time to do online properly - not just in setting it up, but in the ongoing moderation of forums, and participation in chats and so on. Make use of the available tools and most importantly maintain communication with your students and users. Consider using tools like IfThisThenThat so you only have to post something once, but users can get it via several channels.