5 Opportunities For Independent Software Vendors In Education

By Kumudhavalli Rajavelu, Senior Product Support Engineer, Vembu Technologies

Technical advancements have completely reshaped the way we live and function today. These advances are an outcome of creative minds and innovative ideas stimulated by effective learning, imparted to a great extent, by our esteemed educational institutions. Interestingly, the education sector has always been notoriously slow to adopt new technology with very little changes made in the past so-many decades. If we are to transform education and take it to the 21st century, we must focus on improving the classroom experience by incorporating technology into every aspect of student education from arming children with iPads and tablets to retrofitting classrooms with audio and video capabilities.

This is where independent software vendors (ISVs) can play a major role at the classroom level by making learning fun and interactive or by integrating technology into administration to keep things running smoothly.

Here are five opportunities open to independent software vendors that can significantly impact the learning experience in today’s educational institutions.

1. Interactive Smart Class Solutions. Even though smart class solutions isn’t a new idea, there have been recent enhancements in terms of technology waiting to be translated into tangible classroom improvements. Software vendors can develop curriculum-based software, compatible with handheld devices like smartphones and tablets that allow teachers and students to share and discuss content from digital boards and collaborate on daily lesson plans.
2. Virtual Classrooms And Labs. With the rise in demand for e-learning, there is an ever increasing need for virtual classrooms and labs. The application for home-based learning can be hosted through a server, a link to which is easily sent to students’ desktop or mobile devices. Quizzes and interactive Q&As at the end of the session offer the feel of a brick and mortar classroom. In the case of virtual labs, simulation software can be hosted to duplicate the look and feel of working inside a real laboratory. What is more? Data can be evaluated instantly to see the results of the experiments.
3. Administrative Activities. School offices are woefully lagging behind in the use of current technology leading to mismanagement. Software that provide all-in-one solutions for storing and retrieving confidential student documents, recording attendance, tracking the progress of daily lessons, tuition payments, and other core administrative activities, centralized in a single dashboard, would result in tremendous cost and time savings in the long run..
4. Online Testing And Digital Certification. Tests and evaluations help teachers identify strengths and weaknesses in individual students. Schools would benefit from an application that schedules and administers online tests, whitelists access to information on the Internet and sends copies of digital certificates to the school as well as the student.
5. Communication Solutions. Communication between teachers, students and parents are essential. Any information that needs to be circulated requires a medium. Independent software vendors can provide this medium by integrating the Internet of Things and cloud computing. This would make video-conferenced meetings with teachers, communicating daily attendance and student test performance possible with just a mobile app.

Apart from these, there are countless other innovative ideas and opportunities open to those interested in making a real difference in schools and universities. How do you plan to seize it?

Vembu is a provider of affordable software and cloud services with an array of solutions for data protection, disaster recovery, file sharing and CRM. Vembu’s flagship offering is its Backup & Disaster Recovery (BDR) product targeted at IT Administrators in small and medium businesses to protect their Physical, VMware and HyperV environments. Vembu Cloud Services comprises of multiple offerings — OnlineBackup to protect files, email, databases, and applications on servers and desktops, FileShare for syncing, sharing & collaboration, and CRM for help desk, sales force automation and social inbox.