The extraordinary times that we are currently facing have required the Higher Education sector to embrace, adopt and exploit digital technologies quicker than anticipated. The unprecedented impact on traditional methods of teaching inevitably called for institutions to transition to a blended learning environment with the rapid adoption of digital technology in virtual classrooms. Consequently, universities have formed partnerships with edtech companies to enhance the teaching and learning experience of faculty and students.
The partnership between Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and Kortext aims to further enhance the teaching and learning experience by providing a platform that delivers access to core reading materials, whilst facilitating and encouraging interaction between students and lecturers. This is vital for a unique institution such as Saïd Business School. Embedded within one of the world’s most renowned and influential educational institutions, Saïd’s vision is to tackle world scale problems through entrepreneurial and transformative social and ethical goals. With over 90% of its students coming from overseas, Saïd Business School’s diversity and quality of thinking is first class and it’s need for a world class digital platform(s) is paramount.
The partnership with Kortext has been in discussion with Saïd Business School for nearly two years, but the key driver for its realisation has been the pandemic and the subsequent switch to on-line teaching in early March. This resulted in students having limited access to physical libraries where they could access their learning resources. As a contemporary, innovative and influential business school at a University currently ranked number one in the world for the third consecutive year (according to the Financial Times), Saïd Business School already had the infrastructure in place to meet the needs of their students – the only thing missing was a platform for accessing ebooks. As Kortext embeds directly into the University VLE (Canvas), Saïd Business School was already in a good position to add Kortext into their teaching framework by seamlessly integrating the platform with Canvas. This ensured a streamlined provision of core ebooks to students at a time when they most needed it. As a result, Kortext has now become a fundamental part of the teaching and learning delivery at Saïd Business School.
James Gray, CEO at Kortext commented:
“At Kortext we look beyond business to a broader and deeper role in society. We strive to deliver a teaching and learning platform aimed at empowering the next generation of difference makers. We are excited to partner with Said Business School, an institution which shares the same goal by creating the leaders of tomorrow to tackle world scale problems. This partnership is a real opportunity to work together to create an industry leading blended learning experience to deliver outstanding outcomes.”
Mark Bramwell, CIO at Saïd Business School added:
“Given the understandable high expectations of our students, the need to provide a quality online learning environment for our Executive MBA and MBA courses is paramount. Our infrastructure was already in place with solutions such as Canvas, Microsoft (Azure, O365 and Teams) and Zoom, but we needed an integrated ebook platform. With Kortext’s fit with this stack, implementation at pace was straightforward and now the platform has become an integral part of our teaching, learning and programme delivery”.
