For decades, colleges and universities have struggled with making online and blended learning courses as meaningful and engaging as in-person classes. At least momentarily, the COVID-19 pandemic has put many students and instructors on a level playing field. More courses than ever, including those that have historically been offered exclusively in person, are being taught through a remote or blended model.

The current environment represents an enormous opportunity for higher education institutions to step back, take stock and seek out solutions to increase the quality of their remote and blended learning approaches.

Here are three ways that technology can help.

Collaboration huddle spaces were growing in popularity before the coronavirus pandemic hit, and they’re likely to see continued adoption as employees return to work throughout the current year. But huddle spaces in 2021 are likely to look a bit different than they did in 2019.

The video collaboration landscape has changed dramatically over the past year — due to the pandemic and because of new products and features from vendors. Here are seven huddle space trends to watch out for this year:

Many companies were already adopting collaboration technologies before the coronavirus pandemic hit last spring. But the massive shift to a remote work model has created a sort of forced proof of concept for numerous businesses, with employees and managers learning on the fly how to use these tools to support productivity and collaboration.

One thing that many business and IT leaders have discovered: Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) solutions and a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) are often a good fit. UCaaS refers to cloud-delivered capabilities, including voice and telephony, meeting solutions, messaging, presence and other communication applications. With SD-WAN, advanced software simplifies the operation of complex WANs while optimizing the end-user experience.

Here are several reasons why these two technologies work so well together.

Recently, I helped set up a demonstration of a video collaboration huddle space at an East Coast law firm. My partner and I expected the lawyers to use the equipment for a couple of minutes to test it out with their colleagues in another office, but two minutes stretched into five, and five stretched into 25. As the call went on, steady voices rose to angry shouts. However, when the legal team emerged from the room, one of the managing partners looked at us and said, “Please move forward with the project.” Then he walked away.

Most organizations that invest in a new video collaboration system are looking for a way to connect teams in different offices, enable remote work and bring a level of personalization and collaboration to their users that simply isn’t possible with voice-only communication. But if you’re interested in not achieving any of those benefits, then this…

Video collaboration in the customer engagement center (or contact center) makes sense for many of the same reasons the technology makes sense in other settings: When customers can see a human being on the other end of their conversations, they feel a human connection. When customer service representatives or sales staffers can see the people…