Behind the scenes at a university spinout

Written by Luke Allsop

Mantis PR’s Luke Allsop sat down with Mark Newton, Managing Director at CoSector – University of London, to talk about how the business has been supporting customers during the pandemic and looking ahead at sector trends impacting further and higher education this year.

CoSector was born out of the University of London and supports over 100 further and higher education organisations in enriching their digital learning services. From updating and enhancing Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) to facilitating and developing robust digital assessments online.

Mark, what have been some of the key challenges that you and your customers have been facing during the pandemic and how have you supported them?

Most of our customers, and most of all are UK universities and colleges, have had the challenge of flipping to remote online learning at speed. We’ve been able to respond to people’s requests very quickly for additional capacity in the systems and much of that has been delivered via the cloud.

To meet the demand in digital assessment and carrying out exams online, we’ve ensured services were stabilised online. With multiple students uploading assessments and content at the same time, we doubled the capacity to improve system performance to support this. 

At CoSector, we’ve also had the challenge of keeping ourselves running and I think we’ve done that pretty successfully. We flipped to remote working overnight and managed to keep everything running smoothly, remaining agile and supporting customer requests quickly.

 

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