Helping universities transform to stay top of the class

Public sector budgets have been under pressure for many years in Europe. As a result, IT departments have had to take an incremental path, building on top of existing on-premise systems, and dealing with issues in more of a patchwork approach.

But as the pandemic highlighted, public sector organizations need more agile, flexible, and resilient IT to better serve the needs of society. The education sector is a great example. Schools and universities had to quickly pivot to new kinds of learning environments so that they could continue educating and supporting students. ?

So how do education organizations make the leap from their legacy systems to cloud technologies, for the benefit of their students? Here are two great examples.

Graduating from legacy systems to embrace the cloud

The first example is the University College of Northern Denmark, which serves 18,000 students, providing programs ranging from nursing to web development. Since its founding in 2008, the institution relied on on-premise IT to support its students and faculty.

As with any organization that grows and diversifies over the years, the university’s IT department found that a big chunk of their time was spent on putting out fires. Time that could be spent innovating to improve the services and experiences offered to the university’s communities.

With more than 200 on-premise servers, the prospect of modernizing was daunting. But recognizing the additional benefits the IT department could offer, beyond just fixing problems, they worked with partners such as Axpoint and devised a cloud and SaaS migration plan.

Once the transformation was complete, the benefits were immediate.

Community-facing tech tools and services were far more reliable, resulting in happier students, faculty and staff. At the same time, the IT team had more bandwidth and was immediately able to focus more on adding value to the university.

“When we took this plan to top management for approval, we emphasized that this was not a money-saving journey. On the contrary, I estimated there would probably be increasing expenses for three years. It seems we have a positive business case already [one year later]. When we forecast the IT expenditures, they’re now dropping below the previous level, which is quite extraordinary.”

-- René Storgaard Madsen, CIO, University College of Northern Denmark

Inclusivity, accessibility and hybrid learning

My second example is Burgundy School of Business (BSB)?is an international institution of higher education and research.

With 2,800 students, BSB prides itself on offering students personalized connections with professors during lectures. And so when the pandemic struck, it was critical for the school to ensure that the move to hybrid learning models was done in an inclusive way that maintained their close-knit academic culture.

To balance the needs of remote learners and those physically attending lectures, BSB equipped classrooms with Microsoft Teams Rooms and Surface Hub 2S devices. This allowed online students to take part in classes via Teams – able to hear the lecturer, see the content projected on the Surface Hub, and actually see the classroom. Almost as though they were there.

What I love is that BSB recognized that in order to make certain its students got the most of hybrid learning it needed to empower staff. So BSB created a ‘learning lab’ where educators can learn about using digital tools to ensure the best educational outcomes, regardless of whether students are on campus or not.

Improving educational outcomes is at the heart of every successful transformation.

I also really love that accessibility is a priority for BSB. For example, for those students preparing for the Test of English for International Communication, BSB launched a Microsoft Teams and OneNote pilot program featuring an immersive reader to better support learners with dyslexia. Ga?l Millière, Project Manager for Organizational and Functional Processes and Pedagogical Innovation, noted:

?“The solution went above and beyond our expectations, and our failure rate declined by 50 percent.?Teams helped us personalize classes, which would not have been possible in face-to-face classrooms, let alone online during the pandemic.”

Undergoing a transformation can be challenging, whether you’re in the private or public sector. For any leaders in education thinking about digitizing and embracing the cloud, I’d say two things.

First, you are not alone in your journey. Lots of educational institutions have had to rethink their technology strategy, and there are plenty of resources to help you map this out. For example, our partner community can bring additional skills, best practice examples, speed to deployment and can help you see ROI faster.

Second, as you can see from both stories, thinking about end users (your students) will help you focus on the transformations that will have the greatest impact on improving educational outcomes. Yes, there will be cost discussion as University College of Northern Denmark found – but as they clearly defined their overall goal at the onset, they were able to move forward with confidence.

I firmly believe that the current circumstances present an unprecedented opportunity for us to rethink how we educate and support students. Any initiative that leverages others’ learnings – and keeps student success as the north star – is off to a strong start.?