VoIP Phone Service for Universities

A VoIP phone system can be used to implement new methods of teaching or to promote better education in universities. VoIP can achieve this in the following ways:

• Allowing teachers, students, and outside field experts to meet face-to-face and collaborate on their work, sharing their findings in real-time.
• Giving students an easy way to communication in a variety of formats (e.g. text, images, audio, and video) to better understand the subjects and improve the learning experience.
• Connecting students to people, events, and places for research and training purposes. Students can also work with other students outside the university, state, town, and even the country when doing virtual research and field trips.
• Helping students to pursue mentoring programs with experts in various fields and participate in study groups.

Aside from the aforementioned benefits, VoIP also enables teachers and field experts to communicate with students without the need for a physical room or special network because virtual learning environments can be established via desktops, mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and other devices (as long as there is an Internet connection).

Through VoIP features such as call recording, students can listen to lectures remotely without having to leave their own campus. With the call recording feature, VoIP can allow students and teachers to easily record calls and store them in an audio format, which can be easily accessed for mentoring and training purposes.

Teachers can also make use of the voicemail feature to send messages to parents. Through a unified messaging system of VoIP, consolidating e-mail, voicemail, and faxes in a single inbox will become easier for the staff and the teachers. A VoIP phone system will also allow teachers to listen to phone messages or pick up e-mail messages over the mobile phone or desktop. Because of this, they can answer questions from students or parents even when they are outside of the campus.

One great feature of VoIP that gives administrators the power to fully manage operational workflows throughout the campus is the admin portal. Because of this powerful feature, administrators can facilitate and deliver smooth and efficient processes such as:

• tracking student and teacher account updates and monthly billing,
• managing calling features and extensions,
• viewing and monitoring system activities in real time, and
• accessing custom reporting and analytics efficiently.       

Aside from the admin portal, the most common hosted VoIP features implemented by university administrators are automatic call distribution (ACD) queues and announcements. Universities can use ACD queues to route calls to a specific faculty member or to the appropriate departments. For example, if a faculty member takes a leave or goes on a break, he/she can simply log out of the queue to stop receiving calls. Also, university administrators can use the special announcement features to deliver messages or information about schedule changes, school closings, activities, and other significant menu changes.

Additionally, using a VoIP system grants universities economic benefits by reducing maintenance costs, infrastructure costs, and ongoing administrative expenses. Because VoIP utilizes the university’s data network, the infrastructure costs to maintain the system can be reduced. Even long distance call charges will be less because calls can be made entirely over the existing IP networks. In this way, VoIP can provide an opportunity for universities to eliminate the use of an outdated on-site PBX system and instead operate fully featured phone service using their existing network for a fraction of the price.