Delivering his keynote address at this year’s Dell Technologies World 2020 – virtual event – Michael Dell, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies put emphasis on the importance of reinventing education and explained how Dell Student TechCrew, exponentially gained popularity.
“One of the biggest challenges in education that has now been magnified by the move to distance learning is actually providing technical support. And one of our team members, Kim Boutwell, came up with a brilliant idea called Student TechCrew,” he informed.
Dell Student Tech Crew is a program that promotes future career skills and learning with the help of hands on experience as students help their peers and school staff members with technology issues.
This program was created about five years ago. It gives students in high school the opportunity to get an industry certification, the Dell TechDirect Certification.
Before Student TechCrew, there were hundreds of devices that sat on shelves, waiting to be replaced or trashed. Student TechCrew is a program that is helping schools with such devices and giving them an opportunity to take all of those devices that have been broken and sitting on shelves and fix them and put them out to students that did not have devices before.
Reinventing education – this program is helping students to learn stuff by making these devices usable again for educational purpose and hence opening doors to new and innovative possibilities for the student communities.
“250,000 kids are receiving technical support today from members of the Dell Student TechCrew. That’s bringing us closer and closer to access for all. We’re creating opportunities for the students, opportunities for schools, opportunities for the community. It’s so much bigger than IT support,” Kim Boutwell from Dell added.
“We certify 90. They train 2,000. They help 250,000. And you can see how we scale. The other side of the education divide, of course, is access. There are roughly 15 million students just in the United States without digital access. And we’ve launched a pilot program to change that. Partnering across our ecosystem, we’re developing a complete approach that includes access, devices, skills, and resources. And we didn’t invent these priorities for this moment. But this moment has put a magnifying glass to their relevance and urgency,” Michael Dell explained.
A Launching Pad for Tomorrow
“Of course, the pandemic is just a point in time. The question is where do we go from here? I’m an optimist. And I believe it will be a launching pad to a tomorrow that is brighter than most people can imagine. We get to decide what that future looks like and how much of the present we want to bring forward.
People have asked for years, what happens if everyone works from home? Well, now we’re finding out. And there are silver linings. The more we can virtualize travel, interaction, collaboration, communication, the greener, more sustainable, and more productive we become.
This can also be a launchpad to address social disparities. A highly distributed workforce broadens the reach of opportunity. Advances in telemedicine and long-distance learning are breakthrough opportunities to broaden access to care and education. It’s not one size fits all. But overall, we’ve just jumped ahead to a more digital future, and we’re not going back.” Michael Dell added.
