Best Practices

Educational Institutions

WebEx has interviewed many customers in educational institutions nationwide -- high school teachers, college professors and administrators -- and we have compiled below their best practices.

Create a central repository where students can easily access and download class materials for study and review, using the WebOffice Document Manager. This frees everyone – teachers or professors and administrators - from photocopying and hand-distributing class materials to students. It saves time, labor and money. Decentralized user control means no institutional IT bottlenecks slowing down the posting of documents on the WebEx WebOffice central repository.

Post notices on the WebOffice Home Page, which functions like an online bulletin board. WebEx WebOffice Announcements free school administrators from emailing notices to students, or photocopying and posting notices on corridor bulletin boards.

Create an online bibliography for articles in any discipline. College and university professors use the WebOffice Database Manager to log references to abstracts in professional journals and other publications, and to post information about industry conferences – sharing the latest news about advances in their fields with colleagues worldwide.

Conduct online discussions with colleagues worldwide, using WebOffice Discussion Forums. Participants add messages at their own convenience and view messages and comments posted by colleagues, anytime, anywhere.

Manage and track the schedules of all personnel in busy departments, using the WebOffice Calendar. Assignments for specialized personnel, such as school newspaper photographers, tutors, as well as all staff members can be put on the shared calendar. The WebOffice Online Calendar also makes coordinating faculty meetings easier, with its “check participants’ availability” feature. Staff members can share their professional schedules with everyone on WebOffice, while maintaining privacy for their personal appointments.

Maintain a master calendar of all school events for the year, using the WebOffice Group Calendar. All students, faculty and guests can access this calendar for reference throughout the school year to events, including: Orientation, exams, vacations, concerts, conferences, and so on.

Schedule the usage of all school facilities – auditoriums, practice rooms, the football field, conference halls, classrooms, and other meeting space resources -- using the WebOffice Group Calendar. Everyone can quickly check online to see if a room or facility is already booked, or available for their use.

Register participants online for any school event, using the WebOffice online registration site. Students and guests can log in and register anytime, anywhere for school concerts, conferences, workshops, classes, and so on. This eliminates the need for paper registration records.

Track the location and condition of all school equipment, using the WebOffice Database Manager. School music departments can track the location and usage of thousands of musical instruments. Computer sciences departments can track computer inventory. Sports departments can track sporting equipment, and so on.

Student and/or professors working on any type of academic project can use WebEx WebOffice as their center for online collaboration. For instance, two English professors working on an article for a professional journal could use the WebOffice Document Manager to store, review and edit the latest version of the draft of the article. Science lab students could use the WebOffice Database Manager to post their results of sequential experiments, and so on. Virtually any type of academic project could be managed well using WebEx WebOffice.