Introducing Uplink Learning — Making Sure Education Continues this September

How many times did you get on your laptop this week and hunch over the screen to stare at your colleagues? How many times did you ask someone to repeat something when their internet cut out? How many times did you struggle to follow a presentation because the screen share was just too slow?

Probably too many times.

But it’s manageable, you don’t spend your entire workday on video calls. Your work also doesn’t require that you collaborate with someone all the time. You might be getting by.

Now take those video calls, and imagine doing them for eight hours straight. Imagine having to follow everything in all your presentations, and having to get work done during those eight hours. Such is the impending life of many students throughout the country — come September if schools don’t open.

Our team has always worked in education and for too long we’ve seen our schools struggle with educating our students. Those struggles came to a head when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Schools being forced to shut down and students being forced to go online without plans in place has stifled learning. We don’t see a very comprehensive plan forward for our students.

So we got to work. We started looking for distance learning solutions — but finding one that was simple and focused on education was virtually impossible. None of the paid options worked well — some were clunky, others lacked essential collaboration tools, and some had security issues.

Then we found BigBlueButton. We tried out the demo, and it was great. It solved so many of our problems, but most importantly, it was built for education first. There was a huge community around it, and the community has been working on the project for over a decade. Best of all though, it was open-source, so any developer could contribute and support the project.

So we got to work again. This time though, we faced another difficult task. Actually setting up the software. What type of hardware did we need? What type of environment did we need? How should we set it up? How could we customize the platform for the needs of our students?

This time we got it. We figured it out! It worked, and it worked well! Figuring it out though, took way more effort than what we initially thought it would. The system was complex, and scaling it was not easy. We couldn’t fathom how a school with limited resources could ever figure out how to set it up, but if they could — it could make online education a reality.

So today, we decided to join the BigBlueButton community as a separate provider for schools. Uplink Learning aims to provide schools and teachers with a distance learning solution that puts education first while ensuring security and accessibility for students. We bring education-first software to schools while doing all the hard work behind the scenes to make the jobs of our teachers and students easier. We are going to work to make sure that education continues this September.

Want to learn more? Visit uplinklearning.com!