WeSchool, founded in 2016, is dedicated to the digitisation of Italian schools, providing a free platform for teachers to bring their classes online, and for over two million students to connect, collaborate and learn via video, chat and lessons curated by teachers and experts.
Following school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, WeSchool and others answered the call of the Italian Ministry of Education to support remote education. Today, in the midst of national school closures, nearly thirty percent of Italy’s secondary school teachers are using WeSchool to continue their classes online and connect with students virtually.
“In the face of this public health crisis, we're committed to ensuring school goes on,” said Marco De Rossi, Chief Executive Officer, WeSchool. “Nearly 30 percent of all secondary school teachers in Italy are now using our online classroom collaboration platform, powered by 8x8’s Jitsi.org open-source video conferencing solution, to stay connected with their students. This rapid adoption gives us a great deal of hope today and for the future.”
WeSchool transitioned to 8x8’s Jitsi.org infrastructure earlier this month in response to a 40x increase in average website traffic. The enhanced infrastructure is now enabling live video conferencing between teachers and students on the WeSchool platform.
“8x8’s mission is to deliver cloud communications solutions that allow organisations to be ready, resilient and responsive, said Vik Verma, Chief Executive Officer at 8x8, Inc. “The work WeSchool is doing to connect Italy’s teachers and students virtually in the midst of this public health crisis is incredible. 8x8’s Jitsi.org open-source video conferencing solution is dedicated to enabling exactly this kind of innovation, powered by a vibrant global developer community.”
8x8 is the main contributor to the Jitsi.org open-source solution, and the standalone and integrated versions of 8x8 Video Meetings are based on it. The Jitsi.org code has been hardened with over a million downloads and in applications like banking video conferencing, education as a service platforms and home security applications globally. The product is packaged with 8x8 X Series for businesses that have a mobile and remote workforce requiring a highly reliable and resilient solution across desktop and mobile devices for voice, video, chat, contact centre, APIs and advanced analytics.
It is also available as a standalone offering and as part of 8x8 Express, which is for small organisations and teams that require a complete, preconfigured business phone system with a dedicated business number, video meetings and messaging in a single desktop and mobile application.