Remote Learning and Virtual Education

Online platforms and solutions for remote teaching and virtual education have become more essential than ever. Even in situations where in-person teaching is not possible teachers need to maintain the attention and engagement of their students, support their progress and help them to pass their exams. School systems and universities need to prepare for agile decisions when it comes to changing guidelines and safe social distancing while at the same time making sure that you can progress with your educational curriculum. ZEISS solutions for remote learning and virtual education make sure that basic microscopy lessons as well as advanced courses in histological or pathological examinations are fully integrated in your science curriculum, no matter the circumstances.

Remote learning provides an opportunity for students and teachers to remain connected and engaged with the content while working from their homes. Opportunities for remote, or distance learning are typically linked to scheduling conflicts or emergency situations that pose a threat to student safety. While hands-on microscopy lessons are an invaluable tool for every biology class, they are particularly demanding when presented in a remote scenario.
Students are easily engaged when physically interacting with the instrument and looking at real-world samples, ideally in a digital classroom setting. With ZEISS you can recreate this experience online. Microscopes with integrated digital cameras such as ZEISS Primostar 3 connect directly with either your iPad and the free imaging app Labscope or with your Windows PC. This way you can live stream the image from your teacher microscope with the help of video conferencing and collaboration software such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom simply by sharing your screen. You explain the sample details and take annotated snapshots or video clips that you digitally send to your students for further inspection and homework.
Here, the Labscope app can help your students to create their own annotations or even a complete hand-drawing of the sample of interest to learn more about structural details.

When in-person teaching isn’t possible due to social distancing measures, government guidelines or in scenarios where students need to be trained remotely, they can't use microscopes in university labs by themselves to visualize microscope slides and learn about structural details of cells and tissue. However, teaching must go on and demands for more flexibility. A virtual learning environment (VLE) in educational technology is a web-based online learning platform for the digital aspects of courses of study, usually within educational institutions, that gives you the flexibility to train your students virtually anywhere, in a structured way and with a unified platform. With ZEISS Virtual Slide Box, you can make your microscopy sample slides digitally available to your students and create a digital campus. They access all relevant slides from home via their preferred browser or app and annotate and work with them as if they were in the lab. Of course, ZEISS Virtual Slide Box is also an ideal solution for your lab, institute or company when you need to keep your employees busy in a home office scenario with remote access to digitized virtual slides for analysis and annotation purposes.