The context
Non-profit university UniMinuto delivers accessible education for hundreds of thousands of Colombians trapped in generational poverty. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, the university’s in-person operations ground to a halt. Noventiq stepped in to get things going again. We deployed our TotalVoice solution to overhaul UniMinuto’s old video and voice infrastructure and set up Microsoft Teams. Within just 15 days, over 100,000 UniMinuto students were able to register, attend lectures, and submit assignments online. Now, Microsoft Teams and TotalVoice allow UniMinuto to continue as a bastion of education for under-resourced students from the jungles of the Amazon to Africa’s Ivory Coast.
UniMinuto (Universidad Minuto de Diós) was founded in 1970 by a Catholic priest who wanted to help Colombians struggling with poverty receive higher education. Today, UniMinuto is a non-profit institution that works towards Colombia’s social transformation by expanding access to quality education to Colombia’s 50 million citizens. UniMinuto is well on its way to its goal, with 100,000 under-resourced students currently enrolled in over 220 sites around the country. Beyond Colombia, UniMinuto partners with Eudist Technological University Institution of Africa in Africa’s Ivory Coast to share its strategies to reduce generational poverty through education.
UniMinuto assists impoverished students in some of the most remote parts of the country, who were also the most isolated when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Like many universities, UniMinuto didn’t have the technology or the infrastructure on hand to support fully remote learning. The university retained outdated video and voice systems, a registration system that relied on physical sites and paper documents, and no infrastructure to support audio/video capabilities in classes or meeting rooms.
UniMinuto approached Microsoft to find a solution that would be robust enough to support its vast and populous student body, but simple enough to be implemented rapidly. Microsoft recommended working with Noventiq, a trusted partner, to deploy its TotalVoice solution. Noventiq’s TotalVoice solution complements Microsoft Teams by delivering phone systems and call plans in emerging markets to ensure that customers receive the same access and integration as those in developed markets.
The solution
The first phase in Noventiq’s plan was to provide UniMinuto with a flexible, 100% cloud-based phone solution. Noventiq installed a Microsoft Teams phone system using direct routing configuration and enabled Direct Routing to provide a PSTN (public switched telephone network) connection to Microsoft Teams users so that they could make and receive external phone calls on any device using Teams. All teachers, administrators, and staff were then able to receive calls to their regular telephone extension at home.
Next, Noventiq unveiled Microsoft Teams as UniMinuto’s newest classroom. Using the Genesys Cloud Omnichannel Contact Center, UniMinuto was able to keep students updated through text messages, emails, and WhatsApp. The Genesys Contact Center provided students with simple instructions for getting set up on Microsoft Teams. With over half of UniMinuto’s students and teachers isolated in the Amazon jungle, Noventiq worked to bring access to the most remote regions of Colombia. Within 15 days, all of UniMinuto’s over 100,000 students nationwide had adopted Microsoft Teams and were back to their studies.
Noventiq installed Lenovo Hub devices in each classroom that included reliable video and audio hardware, so professors could use the technology in their classrooms to teach directly into each student’s home.
Noventiq’s final challenge was bringing UniMinuto’s completely offline registration process into the digital age. Previously, registering students required them to come onsite and complete paper documents that would later be processed and filed by staff. To automate the process, Noventiq created Microsoft Forms integrated with Teams to allow students to register for classes seamlessly, which sped up average student registration time from five days to a matter of minutes.
Noventiq also assisted UniMinuto’s partner school, the Eudist Institution in Ivory Coast, Africa, by replicating its deployed model at UniMinuto. In June of 2020, the students of the Eudist Institution had no access to their education because of technical instability, so the university lagged three months behind the curriculum. Noventiq and UniMinuto worked together to get the Eudist students and professors back to their studies in just two weeks.
Noventiq’s TotalVoice approach allowed UniMinuto to get back to its goal of increasing social progress in Colombia. Faculty, administration, and students were empowered to learn Microsoft technology, which allowed UniMinuto to ensure equity, access, and capacity for all.
"We have transformed the way we interact with our students, Our classes didn’t stop for a single day, and during the quarantine, there was still interaction, communication was facilitated, and the barriers that prevented us from being together were broken".
"With these types of tools, we began to break the paradigm. Technological change occurs if culture changes", said Saul Reyes, Director of Technology and Information Systems at UniMinoto.