CAUDIT Analysis Part 2: Educational Technology

CAUDIT Analysis Part 2

Issue 4: Educational Technology

“Supporting the use of innovative technology in teaching in learning.”

ICT in higher education is subject to the same disruption that’s affecting other industries. The difference is, universities are also at the frontline of generational disruptions including ‘Digital Natives’.

Such generational and technological shifts bring a primary challenge to institutions like yours. The question is, how do you maintain an agile technology platform and reliable services. These services can transcend technology shifts and allow students to mix and match their own personal requirements with what the university has to offer.

Ultimately, universities must offer emerging technologies and services to students that can be used by both digital and non-digital natives. What doesn’t change, however, is that both groups are seeking tools that are easy to use, fast to access and always available.

Challenges and Considerations

Challenge: Embrace emerging technologies throughout learning spaces as well as virtual and remote laboratories.

The dramatic rise of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon in both the public and private sector presents both challenges and opportunities. Today, organisations and education institutions alike are struggling with deploying technologies that are in sync with what people use in their everyday lives.

The key to resolving this challenge is to have a core platform that offers, tracks and manages these new services. To achieve this, a robust alignment of new technologies is needed with current processes and existing tools/apps. Unfortunately, we’re seeing agencies re-invent the wheel just to get something out there to meet student expectations.

Having an agile platform in place will allow you to standardise new product offerings while at the same time accelerating the adoption of emerging technologies. This platform should facilitate the on-boarding of technologies with minimal effort – backed by orchestration and automation capabilities. In turn, this will give your institution a clear understanding of how technologies are being used and the agility to shift rapidly into new area as required.

Challenge: Provide reliable and robust systems for learning that are interactive, collaborative and personalised.

So you’ve got the latest and greatest technologies…but they’re not always working. What now?

The objective here is that on top of facilitating the use of new technologies through a platform that allows you to distribute, track and manage it, you need to ensure that it is operating efficiently.

Bear in mind, that ‘fast to deliver’ does not always translate to ‘fast to use’. Systems that are deployed need to be reliable so they don’t create more unplanned work.

Unfortunately, unplanned work will impact your institution. For example, full-time employees will be removed from project work to concentrate on fixing issues in production. This has the effect of slowing down the process of adopting and offering emerging technologies—making ICT absent from the innovation discussion.

JDS provides numerous services to ensure the performance of your services—ranging from testing and diagnosing to monitoring. In cases where there are performance issues, we can help you diagnose and narrow down the root-cause of issues. Proceeding to production, JDS can give you visibility into the performance and availability of your systems so you can keep an eye on how your services are being used, and address any issues early—reducing unplanned work.

About JDS

With extensive experience across the higher education sector, JDS assists institutions of all sizes to streamline operations, boost performance and gain competitive advantage in an environment of tight funding and increasing student expectations. With more than 10 years’ experience in optimising IT service performance and availability, JDS is the partner of choice for trusted IT solutions and services across many leading higher education institutions. Contact us to find out more.