28 March 2020 - Update 10 from ucisa - Sector offers from ucisa corporate members
Late last week ucisa wrote to all our corporate members advising of the work we are doing to support institution's planning and how we are representing the sector to government agencies and HE/FE organisations. We also asked our corporate members for their understanding at this time and to recognise the pressure the sector is under by avoiding cold calling or sending unsolicited emails. To ensure important messages and offers of support reached institutions, we offered to post offers of support on our website and, where appropriate via our regular bulletins.
Several of our corporate members have responded immediately. As offers come in, we’ll be adding them to a dedicated web page so be sure to check this regularly to see the latest offers. To give you a flavour of what you might expect there we have set out below the first few offers received:
LogMeIn
We have created a Remote Working Toolkit which we are providing to universities for free for 3 months to help them to be able to keep running online classes and meetings. There is no obligation to buy after the 3 months for the universities. More details on the kits can be found here.
Strategic Blue
Strategic Blue has partnered with leading cloud providers to offer free cloud credits for research related to the current situation. Two schemes: a) big science responses b) community responses.
Blackboard
- Preparing to Scale Teaching and Learning Online.
- Our Webinar Training Series: Accelerate Your Transition to Remote Instruction. Sessions are already underway, recordings will be made available.
- FREE courses. One is the Online Facilitation using Blackboard Collaborate – in depth staff development on Collaborate. More details can be found here and by searching on the Type of Course = FREE
- We also have a host of resources to help and an option for departments to be able to take advantage of some preferential pricing to ensure institutions can equip educators with virtual classrooms to reach students anywhere as well as a free trial.
AWS
For research institutions the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative (DDI) provides support for innovation in rapid and accurate patient testing, and other diagnostic solutions to mitigate future outbreaks. AWS is committing $20 million over the next year to accelerate research, innovation, and development to speed our collective understanding and detection of the disease. Funding will be provided through a combination of AWS in-kind credits and technical support to assist accredited research institutions harness the cloud to tackle this challenge. Learn more.
