Tsitou: Distance learning technologies provide teachers with ample opportunity

Teachers who are familiar with distance learning technologies can, in theory, work for any educational establishment in any country of the world, said Vadzim Tsitou, Vice-Rector of Magna Carta Oxford Business School, at the roundtable to discuss distance learning technologies hosted by BelTA press center.

"For example, in 2016-2017 our college will need thousands of online tutors. Currently the Open University (United Kingdom) has about 200,000 online students, the University of Phoenix (United States) has around 400,000 students. This applies only to academic programmes, without taking into account certificate programmes,” he said. By the way, Magna Carta Oxford Business School offers the Effective Online Tutoring Programme, which is a programme of occupational retraining.

Microsoft corporation are also ready to provide teachers with knowledge about the latest technologies usage. “There are tutors and programmes aimed at implementation of the IT Academy,” said Evgeny Koren, business development manager in public sector and education at the Representative Office of Microsoft Corporation in Belarus. "IT Academy offers a huge amount of content from interactive and distance learning courses delivered in Russian language for training teachers. They allow people to obtain and master skills of working with different technologies, ranging from the basics of computer literacy to professional courses," he noted.

Currently Microsoft offers a wide range of distance learning technologies. It has developed a comprehensive package for the education system of Belarus, which includes the Microsoft SharePoint platform and a standard set of Office products and resources. The new office applications, such as Delve and Sway, have also become available for teachers and students.

Delve helps users to search content across Office 365. The application considers the work style and interactions between the user and his/her colleagues, and based on the obtained results selects relevant data. Other users do not see your personal documents (for example, stored in personal folders in OneDrive for business). Sway application is designed to create presentations with media stored in OneDrive, Facebook or Youtube. Presentations could be made both by using pre-designed or your own layout. In fact Sway is a universal tool for interactive content presentation.