Educational platform from Twente plays an important role during corona

ICT and digitisation in schools have gained momentum. It was necessary to find a solution for learning from a distance quickly, due to the closing of the schools. Heutink ICT worked at lightning speed to ensure that thousands of students could learn from home. A well-known solution from Heutink ICT is MOO (My Online Environment), which was used by 200,000 people simultaneously at the peak of the crisis. MOO is still being expanded with new functionalities and currently has over 500,000 unique users. 

MOO is a dashboard for both teachers and students. It is a place where all kinds of platforms, functionalities and content come together. MOO is built modularly and very flexible so that it can be set up differently for each school. MOO is the online learning and work environment for its users, and it can be customised for each group or student. User-friendliness is paramount: MOO is the place where everything comes together. Heutink ITC arranged a lot for learning from home in a short period, to make learning as easy and efficient as possible for everyone during the corona crisis and all the measures that came with it. Children do their homework at home using online educational programmes. The platform also provides options for video calls between teachers and students, and online communication to parents. 

Many schools were already using MOO, but not all the possibilities that the platform has to offer were used enough in practice. Rob ten Thije, Services Manager at Heutink ICT, explains: “We saw that the threshold for actually “working in the cloud” was still a bit too high for many schools. Many users abruptly crossed this threshold out of necessity, due to the coronavirus. And with an incredibly positive result, really; almost every primary school in the Netherlands was able to work online during this crisis. They were able to teach digitally, and they could collaborate comfortably in the cloud. We believe this will benefit education.”

Heutink ICT offered extra services to educational institutions during this period. Heutink ICT extended the opening hours at the service desk, for example. They also organised free webinars for teachers, and a virtual meeting place was set up for teachers, where they could share tips and tricks and help each other out. “We like helping our customers get started with using ICT in their curricula. Not just with the technical side, but also with how it can be used in their daily programmes.” 
Heutink ICT has been around for over 20 years now. MOO was introduced in 2010, and it is one of the ICT suppliers’ leading solutions. Heutink ICT expects that the number of MOO users will increase in the future, because ICT and digitisation in schools have gained so much momentum. They also expect that the users will use MOO more intensively. “Teachers, students and parents have become more accustomed to using MOO, partly because of corona”, says Rob ten Thije.