By Insight Editor / 20 Nov 2018 / Topics: Cloud Unified communications Customer experience
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Education
Challenge:
The client looked to drive education equality and transform learning across their 76,000 students and 11,000 teachers in geographically vast the Western Australian State.
Solution:
- Conversation platform for centrally defined user experience
- On-prem workload migration to Azure data warehouse
- Power BI reporting
- Azure virtual datacentre
Results:
- Enabled learning with O365 & teams adoption
- Improved collaboration and knowledge amongst the school network
- Enabling 360 degree, real-time view and analysis of each student
- Faster infrastructure provisioning with Azure
Solution area:
Insight’s Digital Innovation solutions help clients digitally transform their business operations to improve user engagement and experience.
CEWA is a system of Catholic schools with 76,000 students and 11,000 staff across Western Australia; CEWA’s 162 schools range from metropolitan schools with more than 1,000 students to remote rural schools with fewer than a dozen.
Recognising the potential of a connected system to enhance educational outcomes and support the administrative efficiencies of schools, CEWA undertook a program of work that harnesses digital technology across a geographically dispersed system of 162 schools.
However, to provide equitable access for all students, including those in remote and isolated areas of Western Australia, CEWA looked to its digital transformation program, named 'LEADing Lights'.
How Insight has helped
Insight has been an instrumental technology partner to building some core parts of the program, including:
• The Conversation platform which aggregates and displays information from a range of systems to meet the digital needs of the 76,000 students, 11,000 staff and parents. A series of customised Angular and .NET portals is being developed to provide a simple and personalised digital hub for each user to surface the tools and information they need for their everyday activities via a single, easy-to-use environment. The user interfaces are designed with a simple, clean and user-centric view as a window into the 'Administration of Schools' system. For teachers, they can have an ‘at a glance’ view into student wellbeing, attendance and academic performance.
• Established a best-practice foundation for data integration, warehousing and analytics, including machine learning. Significant number of databases were migrated from the 162 schools' legacy on-premises environments into the newly created Data Warehouse. Utilising the Cortana Intelligence Suite, CEWA is now able to provide reporting capabilities on historical data back 15 years. By developing a range of Power BI reporting dashboards, key student records and related data are brought together with the intention to enable a 360-degree, real-time integrated view and analysis of each student. This will open doors for CEWA to leverage advanced analytics to start analysing technology usage patterns, outcomes and predictive models in-house to place the student at the centre of an integrated, holistic experience. CEWA will have an integrated platform that will allow the system to provide better insights to support positive learning outcomes for students and pathways for the professional growth of teachers.
• Creation of the Azure Virtual Datacentre Blueprint that outlines the key design principles, process, policies and architecture for the on-boarding of schools into Microsoft Azure, including the existing CEWA Azure subscriptions. Azure Virtual Datacentre provisioning engine.
• Remediation of the existing CEWA Azure subscriptions to optimise, standardise and secure these environments according to the Azure Virtual Datacentre Blueprint.
• Development and implementation of an that automates the deployment of the Azure Virtual Datacentre, using Infrastructure as Code templates to provide each school with a well-governed virtual datacentre that can be deployed in minutes and future proof the needs for new schools joining the program.
The result
“LEADing Lights delivers a unified digital learning ecosystem for all CEWA schools, combining advanced technical capabilities with the latest and most powerful education tools in one central environment. Ignia [an Insight Company] has been a key partner of ours to help make this vision a reality.
They have taken tools primarily used for business and turned them into tools for students and teachers - designing a very simple, clean, user interface that provides that window into all of the different systems that we have. “
Aidan McCarthy, Head of Digital Transformation, CEWA
“We’re breaking down data silos inside and outside schools and moving applications into the Azure cloud, so we have comprehensive, holistic information about every child and staff member, no matter which school they’re attending. We want to understand how learning is happening for our students, using their own data and performance rather than extrapolating from other school systems’ analytics.”
Dr. Ginno Kelley, Head of Digital Transformation, Teaching & Learning, CEWA
