Residence programming began on Sept. 6 after move-in finished. This year, all programming is happening online through a new communication platform called Raftr, which consolidates all of the information students living in residence need. Through the platform, students can connect with staff and attend community meetings and other virtual residence events. According to Flis, “most” students have been attending the community meetings and the larger events have seen a turnout of a couple dozen students.

Raftr is optimised for college communities and has tools for college administrators, faculty, and student leaders to engage with their student bodies. Its mission is much deeper than simply creating a better online service; rather, it addresses some fundamental human needs and wants. It is a mission more pertinent than ever in this post-Covid world.

Sue Decker, CEO at Raftr, discusses offering the social network platform free of charge to colleges and universities amid the coronavirus outbreak. She also talks about her time serving on corporate boards, including at Costco, and why some businesses need to have an online playbook.

Determining a timeline for when higher education will go back to “normal” is an aimless guessing game. Will it be weeks? Months? Years? For colleges and universities, the sudden shift away from traditional classroom spaces has upended typical teaching tactics. Even schools with minimal online infrastructure must now deliver distance learning at scale. These tools facilitate the sharing of information between educators, administrators and students. Solutions like Raftr provide public and private chat channels, while Bisk delivers strategy planning at scale. Meanwhile, popular enterprise tool Microsoft Teams makes it easy to schedule meetings, assign tasks and collaborate on key documents.

With colleges and universities shuttered and in remote learning mode, there’s a lot to figure out. Transitioning from in-classroom interactions to online or virtual education isn’t an easy task. Choosing the right solutions requires an understanding of what will help faculty connect with students to achieve their goals. Raftr: Communication tool Raftr is now free for post-secondary schools until July 1. Educators and administrators get access to public and private chat channels, can hold “office hours” in private channels and have the ability to create unlimited educational groups.

A number of ed tech companies around the world – and the country of Estonia – are offering free services to universities, schools and students to limit the disruption to learning caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Demand is also being satisfied by companies like Silicon Valley-based higher ed tech company Raftr which is offering its messaging and notifications platform to colleges and universities free of charge through the end of the academic year. Raftr’s app is designed to facilitate instant and direct communication between college administrations and their students in a mobile-first platform, including the ability to send direct messages instantly to students’ mobile devices.

Silicon Valley-based higher ed tech company Raftr announced today that it will offer its messaging and notifications platform free of charge through July 1, 2020 to colleges and universities, many of which are facing disruption and dislocation as a result of COVID-19 concerns. Each institution’s network is entirely private, limited to that community’s constituents. The app facilitates immediate and direct communication between college administrations and their students in a mobile-first platform, enabling instant direct messaging to students’ mobile devices.

As the new coronavirus outbreak prompted college after university to start shifting classes online -- either for a few weeks or for the remainder of the spring semester -- education technology companies lined up to say they could help. Tech vendors promoting various free services for colleges or their employees included, in no particular order, communications provider Avaya, chat and video messaging provider Pronto, learning platform Top Hat, game-based learning platform Kahoot!, messaging and notifications service Raftr, online program manager Bisk, and publishing giant Wiley. Another publisher, Macmillan, said it was giving its customers free use of its online learning platforms through the end of spring.