Consolidating IT systems to boost teacher productivity

There’s no denying Australia is facing an education crisis. While the mounting pressures on schools predate COVID-19, the continued impact of the pandemic is still unfolding as the student to teacher ratio increases.

In the face of the teacher shortage, the average teacher’s workload is stretching them to the limit. Addressing this crisis will be a slow burn, but in the meantime, schools and educational institutions can look within their campus walls to understand technological changes that they can implement to streamline a teacher’s experience.

After two years of remote learning, digitally driven teaching methods are well ingrained in most classrooms, but with many school IT departments working to a pre-pandemic model, teachers are constantly battling with a system that is not up to date with their needs. For every minute a teacher is fiddling with their laptop, waiting for something to load — only to get to an unresponsive web page or having their parent portal crash — it takes away from the time they can spend educating and creating a positive impact on students. It is critical to empower teachers with tech that smoothens their work processes, so they can spend less time troubleshooting and more time making a difference in their students’ lives.

Challenges faced by the industry at present

Access to computers and digital learning tools has increasingly become a priority not only for teachers, but also students. This means 24/7 access to virtual desktops to support productivity, when and wherever a user wants. To keep students engaged, digital educational experiences like this must be reliable and responsive.

While IT teams work to modernise old-school IT systems, they’re faced with trying to replace legacy systems and implement new infrastructure at the same time. Legacy systems such as overloaded Wi-Fi networks, outdated software and slow laptops and PCs are unable to keep up with the demands of the digital learning landscape. The teething process to phase these out can be challenging and cause disruptions, but the long-term benefits of improving applications for educators, students and administrators to build a system that is operating at speed will far outweigh any initial issues.

The solution

In such a dynamic environment, with a vast IT infrastructure that’s made up of networks, clouds, servers, applications and much more, full visibility into how these systems are operating is the secret to keeping school technology running securely, efficiently and reliably.

IT teams operating without insight into their infrastructure are manually using multiple platforms to identify and troubleshoot issues. This can be particularly detrimental for small teams who cannot afford the time to pinpoint system errors. With no access to the relevant reports and data, IT teams have little understanding of the inner workings of all the systems that are deployed throughout the school, both on campus and remotely. The introduction of a unified observability platform supports insight into the hundreds of systems running at one time, allowing IT teams to invest in innovations that can enhance digital learning experiences.

Sydney-based independent the Ascham School — off the back of remote learning — replaced their existing third-party monitoring service with a unified observability platform. This change very quickly addressed their key business need, which was to gain insight into the performance of the school’s infrastructure. While experiencing in excess of 500 live network tickets at a time, due to the lack of visibility, the IT team was taking 30 minutes to an hour to identify a single issue. Each one of these alerts has the capacity to escalate and cause outages across the school, very seriously disrupting learning outcomes.

Following the adoption of single-pane observability, Ascham School saw a 60% increase in team productivity and a 50% drop in infrastructure-related network tickets. The awareness of how infrastructures are operating not only allows IT teams to save money and time resolving issues, but also provides insight for intelligent troubleshooting and preventive maintenance — ensuring pain points are not recurring. With an automated observability platform in play, Ascham could get the answers they needed instantaneously and solve problems quickly, meaning staff and students can carry out their work online seamlessly.

The power of observability can enable better teaching and learning, whether in person or remote. When the IT stack of a school is performing at its best, both teachers and students benefit from the system and can strive for better outcomes in the classroom.

Image credit: iStock.com/metamorworks