Introducing Microsoft Viva Connections for Education

[Guest jseghersMSFT]

Today’s students juggle more than just classes. They join clubs, volunteer with non-profits, pick up part-time jobs, play sports, and more. With their time spread so thin, it can be difficult to manage all the information, apps, and platforms associated with all their activities. Institutions are seeking the right technologies to keep students engaged, connected, and motivated, but implementing so many different tools makes it difficult for students to keep up with campus-wide news, clubs, internship opportunities, and more.

 

 

 

On average, 143 EdTech tools were used by students in the 2021-2022 school year¹, negatively impacting engagement, retention, and other important outcomes. To help students succeed in this scattered environment with such a large variety of information, institutions need to provide a home base for students to find everything they need.

 

 

 

Students need one connected experience.

 

 

 

Microsoft Viva Connections for Education is a digital home that centralizes all the resources students need in one place, directly within Microsoft Teams.

 

 

 

 

With intuitive design and easy access, the dashboard is personalized for each student’s individual needs, giving them a digital home where they can start and end each day—helping them stay connected to your institution at every step along their academic journey.

 

 

 

Students thrive when their academic and extracurricular resources are easily accessible. Equipped with customized cards for each student, the dashboard organizes their courses, assignments, extracurricular activities, tuition payments, internship opportunities, scholarship applications, and more.

 

 

 

When setting up Viva Connections for Education at your institution, you can either use pre-built cards or develop new cards to fit specific scenarios.

 

 

 

 

You can also brand the dashboard experience with your institution’s colors and logo to create a sense of continuity for students.

 

 

 

 

When juggling classes, part-time jobs, volunteer opportunities, sports or music practice, or whichever extracurricular activities they may be involved in, students need support to help simplify their experience. Within Viva Connections for Education, students can access your institution’s intranet to collaborate on relevant content and files with their peers or educators, and connect to key third-party applications, such as your institution’s learning management system (LMS) or other internal services.

 

 

 

 

And dashboard cards are customizable for individual students based on their area of study, extracurricular interests, and other preferences, so that they can manage student life from one place.

 

 

 

With Viva Connections for Education, you can also send targeted messages to your whole institution or subsets of students. Students can stay up to date on key news by scrolling through the Viva Connections for Education feed, helping them learn about club announcements, campus events, cafeteria menus, and more.

 

 

 

 

Institutions can easily share updates in real time, so students don’t miss out on class registration deadlines, recently chartered clubs looking for members, or upcoming speakers visiting campus. Students can select their default language in Teams to receive all this information in the way that works best for them, and they can get the same experience on their mobile devices.

 

 

 

 

 

Together, these features help students feel connected to your institution whether they’re on campus, at home, or somewhere in between.

 

 

 

Give students a connected experience today

 

 

Viva Connections for Education is a simplified, student-centered digital home that organizes relevant information and resources in a single dashboard. The seamless usability across devices keeps students plugged in from anywhere, so they can stay immersed in their higher education experience no matter where they are. Instead of losing their focus and energy in a tug-of-war between different apps and platforms, students can get what they need, when they need it, in one place.

 

 

 

If you’re interested in using Viva Connections for Education, you can learn more about pairing the platform with your existing Microsoft capabilities on the Viva Connections website.

 

Viva Connections for Education at South Gloucestershire and Stroud College

 

 

SGS College chose Viva Connections for Education as the platform for their student portal “eCampus”. The goal of the project was to augment the existing desktop experience with a modern, tailored to the student individual journey mobile experience. Using Viva Connections for Education, a new dashboard was created for students within Teams Mobile, providing students with the right information and resources they need on their preferred platform.

 

 

 

 

Learn more about SGS College.

 

Partnering with Microsoft on Viva Connections for Education

 

 

Thanks to the extensibility capabilities of Viva Connections for Education, several innovative companies are already building on the framework to deliver unique user experiences and provide new education-relevant Cards for Viva Connections for Education. As we prepare for this exciting launch, we encourage you to check out the educational solutions from Cloud Design Box, Attender, Breakthru and CloudClass, and stay tuned for further details on their progress with Viva Connections for Education.

 

 

 

 

¹Instructure, 2022

 

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