By 2024, all Secondary One students will own a school-prescribed personal learning device (PLD) under Singapore’s new national digital literacy programme. This programme is set to equip students with essential digital skills to thrive in the New Economy.
Students carrying a personal learning device have the opportunity to collaborate with fellow peers in projects and access courses materials anytime and anywhere in the campus as long as they have internet access. Similarly, educators can better monitor online coursework and assess each student’s progress without having to meet face-to-face.
With the increased adoption of personal learning devices, our client, a Singapore academic institution, faced an unprecedented challenge to scale its IT infrastructure to implement the PLD programme.
Challenges
Implementing a PLD programme involves a number of complex IT-related tasks, including hardware and software setup, network configuration, internet connectivity, security management, and user support.
Some of the challenges experienced by the school are:
Slow internet connectivity and inadequate network setup
The school does not have the necessary network infrastructure to support a large number of devices.
Aside from blind spots (areas where there are no internet), slow and patchy internet connectivity across 100 wifi access points also hinder students’ ability to access learning portals.
This challenge presents the need to set up wireless access points, routers, and other networking equipment to ensure reliable and secure connectivity.
Lack of IT resources and expertise
Robust IT management begins with the right workflow and a team with the necessary skills to solve present challenges.
With a team of only 2 IT staff, the school faced difficulty in upgrading its IT setup and building its workflows due to a lack of expertise and excessive manual processes.
Solution
Effective IT Operations Management (ITOM)
Acclivis analyzed the school’s network traffic, mapped out the wifi requirements, and migrated the whole back-office IT stack including management and monitoring of equipment and incidents using our SERVICEONE platform.
Here are a few ways our platform has benefitted the school:
Digitalizing IT workflows: Our SERVICEONE platform helps automate IT workflows to eliminate unnecessary manual processes that are time consuming.
Incident management: Our SERVICEONE platform is used to track and manage incidents such as system outages, network failures and other IT issues. The platform helps the school to predict issues before they impact users, automate the incident management process to ensure that issues are quickly identified and cascaded to the right person through the workflow, and then resolved in a timely manner.
Visibility of asset management and SLAs: Our SERVICEONE platform is used to manage IT assets such as laptops, servers, and other hardware. The platform can track asset location, ownership, and usage, helping to optimize asset utilization and reduce unnecessary purchases. Our platform allows the school’s IT staff to monitor incident resolution times, asset utilization, and service delivery times through a centralized dashboard.
Conclusion
Overall, IT plays a crucial role in helping schools implement a PLD programme. By working closely with the school’s stakeholders, Acclivis is able to optimize the ITOM and ITSM processes. As a result, students are able to benefit from the latest digital technologies to support their learning.
