Due to the ever-changing technical needs of educational institutions, IT has become a critical part of every educational institution’s infrastructure.
Technology has rapidly evolved within the education sector — allowing providers to truly push the boundaries of what’s possible and innovate for the benefit of their students.
However, some challenges come with this which can be difficult to navigate. Due to the increasing technological needs in the educational sector, adjusting to ensure the right accommodations and preparations are made within your organisation, is vital to ensure success.
In this blog, we’re going to go over everything you need to know about the IT challenges that are common to the education sector, and how you can ensure that you’re prepared for them.
As IT has become a more vital consideration to organisations worldwide, the demand for IT has also rapidly increased. This means that, naturally, there’s a shortage of skilled personnel worldwide.
This is especially true in education — particularly in schools and universities that use a fully integrated system that students can access anywhere. Ensuring your IT team is knowledgeable and accessible — and that your systems have been set up optimally and efficiently, has never been more important.
The rapid onset of new technologies means that there are fewer people trained in the latest IT advancements than in other fields. This is the ongoing skills shortage that companies worldwide are plagued with.
Naturally, the ongoing skills shortage means that employing people who are skilled in the world of IT is a costly endeavour —employing the vast array of experts required to manage your IT systems and strategy comes at a quickly escalating cost. However, external service providers enable you to lower these costs while still having an expert team at your fingertips.
As technology moves forward, so do hardware requirements and the minimum hardware specification needed to utilise the latest technologies and innovations in your organisation increases.
As many of these technologies have now become essential, making sure that your infrastructure is up to date is critical to ensure that everything runs smoothly without causing outages for your students.
However, this also consumes time and resources. Having to evaluate your hardware and ensure that everything is up to date whenever you integrate a new system is costly and upgrading hardware — or even just scaling up resources — can require a lot of capital expenditure, stretching an educational institution’s limited budgets.
This is why more organisations are looking at the cloud as a solution — instead of having to upgrade systems and infrastructure manually, a cloud-based solution can scale up (and down!) as required without the need for costly hardware upgrades, while reducing the risks of downtime associated with hardware failures.
System integration is the process of bringing together components of a system to integrate into one infrastructure — allowing them to function as one.
For an educational system, this is both necessary and difficult as modern technologies are made specifically for educational purposes. System integration means that data is accessible throughout different subsections of your entire system — which is important both for educators and students.
However, having a fully integrated and synchronised system is a process that will forever need maintenance. Due to the many moving parts of an integrated infrastructure, any new systems will evolve your system. This means you’ll need to dedicate time to integrate and manage the system correctly.
The ability to adapt to change is especially important for educational institutions, as change is a constant within education. Teachers and administrators will constantly be looking for ways to improve their organisation’s ability to provide the best education and care for their students — this is known as the cycle of continuous improvement.
However, the amount of change possible in this environment is limited. Due to the sheer amount of workload put onto any given teacher or institution, making changes and ensuring improvement is a trickier endeavour than in most other sectors. This is why every change that’s made has to be well thought out and planned — and why change is heavily challenged for a lot of educational institutions.
Change management is the key— figuring out what needs to change, how to implement it and how to ensure everything is successful. In this process, clear communication and factually based decisions are key — this is why ensuring that a proper plan is in place is essential.
Ensuring you have a well-defined technology roadmap is a critical element for enabling change.
Educational funding is very limited and budgets are stretched more than ever. This means that a lot of the challenges mentioned above — that can traditionally be solved by allocating funding or resources to the issue — are more difficult to solve in the educational setting.
With this, it’s vital to ensure that costs are being allocated both effectively and efficiently. Making sure that the limited budget your organisation has is spent effectively is crucial to ensuring its success, meaning that finding more cost-effective solutions that are suitable for the educational sector is vital. One of the ways to ensure your organisation is distributing resources to the correct places is by partnering with an experienced service provider.
We’ll be able to help you work out what’s most important for your organisation and build a strategy to deliver the best solutions going forward. Additionally, a service provider is far more cost-effective than hiring in-house IT experts and specialists and brings a wider breadth of knowledge.
As cyberattacks increase, educational bodies are at risk due to vulnerable IT infrastructure. If IT is not considered to be core to the business of education, it can become a soft target. Often, IT is under-resourced or underinvested in and managing cybersecurity constantly, is a challenge.
Ever-emerging cybersecurity threats are increasingly complex and intelligent and harder to detect – making it difficult for schools to stay abreast of the threats and to protect the data they hold.
Cybersecurity training and attack prevention strategies are vital in ensuring schools are protected against threats. We can help to establish key strategies for staying protected from attacks across the entire threat landscape.
Educational institutions have many challenges regarding IT that are unique to their sector and environment. With the unique challenges of being an education provider, there are several considerations to make to ensure that your students receive the best education available.
If your organisation is looking to solve these challenges, get in touch with us today. We’ll be able to help you work through them and establish the most important steps to take. Instead of fighting these challenges alone, we’re here to give you a helping hand.