November 22, 2009
Spiral against the flu
by Andrei Volgin, president
Spiral can be instrumental in fighting epidemic outbreaks, such as the swine flu. I had to travel all the way to Cairo, Egypt, to hear this interesting observation from our local partners. Recently, schools in Cairo were closed for several weeks to prevent further spread of the disease. With no online connection to their schools, students could neither receive nor complete their assignments. In many cases, parents had to drive to schools to pick up packets for their kids. The prices for private tutoring soared.
Most students in Egypt do not have computers or Internet access at home, so having a system like Spiral at their schools is not much help when a school is closed. Yet, Internet penetration is quickly expanding worldwide, and some schools in the region are considering migrating to a web-based information system in part as a precaution against a possible pandemic, and of course for the other benefits delivered by such a system. I wonder how many schools in the U.S. have looked at web-based information systems from this angle. On our part, we decided to speed up the rollout of an emergency notification service that will be integrated with the rest of the system. Let's hope we never have any pandemics - if our system is used for snow day alerts only, it is also quite useful.
No snow in Egypt. They worry about sand storms....
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