FCCN continues to support the community in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing technology and knowledge to the homes of students, researchers, and teachers. Learn about the services that may be useful in the context of distance learning and teleworking.
We're back in lockdown and continuing to follow social distancing guidelines. Distance learning remains a useful learning tool and is also just a click away.
As with the last lockdown, the FCCN Unit of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) is seeking to act on several fronts and continues to bring technology and knowledge to the homes of students, researchers, and teachers, seeking to provide and improve the experience of its activities.
Recall the FCCN services that may be useful to the teaching and research community in a context of distance learning and teleworking.
Colibri
Colibri was the most relevant service in the previous lockdown, which, due to massive use, had its licensing reinforced, in 1111%, and a progressive reinforcement of the infrastructure at the level of front-end of the service. It guarantees a favorable environment for meetings, group work, classes, and remote tutorials. The service allows videoconferencing sessions with capacity for 300 participants per session, Audio, video, text, images, whiteboards, and screens can be shared. Sessions can also be recorded for later recording and availability through the Educast service.
Between March and June 2020 (school term) we counted 1,055,970 sessions Colibri. As a comparison model, throughout 2019, we had a total of 30.847. In terms of participants, the number reflected in this period is 15.865.364, compared to 2019, in which we had a total of 206.586.
Educast
Educast makes it easy for users to record, edit, and publish educational videos (classes or training sessions) on a platform or website. Published content can be revisited whenever they like and can be embedded on college or school websites.
The service recorded, between March and June 2020, 10.583 videos produced, when the annual total in 2019 was 2.179 videos. The number of views reached in the referred period, 1.369.077, concluding that, in just 4 months, the annual total for 2019 was surpassed, which had reached 1.019.568 views.
NAU – Always Learning
Although the Colibri and Educast services were clearly the ones that stood out the most during the first lockdown, it is still important to highlight NAU platform, a tool to support teleworking, distance learning and knowledge acquisition in a new professional area.
An online course platform, in MOOC format (Massive Open Online Course), that can be used by institutions and companies to train teleworking workers. Between March and June 2020, NAU recorded 73.248 new participants, 112,247 registrations and issued 54.438 certificates.
Discover the various courses available at Nau at: https://nau.edu.pt
Videocast
With the service Videocast it is possible to do streaming of “one to many” video, in a regime of self-service, that the community can use whenever they want, setting up their own sessions.
Through this service, content is shared easily through a web page with integrated chat, making it possible to share a class or training session with anyone who has access to the broadcast link.
Filesender – Send (large) files
Another service that also served as support during the first lockdown, and which you can continue to use and abuse, is Filesender. A service for securely exchanging large files, with a maximum limit of 100 GB.
Filesender recorded between March and June 2020, 31,124 uploads, while the annual total in 2019 was 39,898 uploads.
b-on – Online Knowledge Library
THE b-on provides students and researchers with unlimited and permanent access to thousands of journals and e-books published by some of the leading international publishers, in order to complement their biographies.
We would like to remind you that, in the context of the current pandemic, several publishers (b-on and non-b-on) continue to make many of their contents/collections available in open access, especially in the areas of virology and COVID-19.
During the first lockdown, FCCN reinforced the capacity of its core services, not only in terms of infrastructure and licensing, but also in terms of human resources, to ensure the transition from in-person to online learning. The rapid, agile, and productive response to these needs enabled the community to maintain its activities, particularly in the implementation of remote learning scenarios, group meetings, information sharing, and teleworking. We continue to work together to provide significant support for maintaining teaching and research activities amid the exceptional circumstances the country is experiencing.
For more information, visit www.fccn.pt or contact our specialized teams.
Stay safe!
