How an adaptive digital workplace will bring clarity to the education sector
Teachers can lose time having to switch between apps or find documents on systems or working through an outdated intranet. But adopting an adaptive digital workplace can alleviate these problems.
By Erik Nicolai, co-founder and CEO, Workspace 365
Teaching and imparting knowledge is unquestionably a difficult profession. It doesn’t need to be made any harder by technology that works against the teacher or lecturer at the front of the classroom rather than with them – but this is exactly what is happening.
Teachers are losing up to an hour of their working day as they switch between apps, frequently having to sign into anywhere up to 30 of them individually every day. Switching between apps is a huge frustration for teachers, as different parts of different classes and lectures are stored in different, disparate parts of their school, college or university’s IT networks. There are too many places where they may need to look to find documents they have saved or files that are essential to the teaching and learning experience.
Then there’s the issue of collaboration, which is vital in the classroom. While most educational institutions will almost certainly have an intranet as a way of sharing information, a significant proportion of teachers have given up on them and don’t use them. They say the information they need is hard to find on a traditional intranet, their designs are clunky and outdated and they don’t add value to their already-stressful working day.
Finally, like in most jobs, teachers are bound by their institutions when it comes to the technology that they have at their disposal to do their jobs. The seats of learning manage their devices, which means that productivity inevitably suffers if the hardware develops an issue.
It all adds up to what can be termed ‘technostress’ – and it’s something into which research on its effects on university lecturers has already been carried out. Similarly, although many Generation Z students will be digital natives who have lived with technologies for their entire lives, their reliance on it in the classroom or lecture theatre may be overwhelming as it turns them, to all intents and purposes, into ‘telecommuters’ like their parents who may have had to work from home during the pandemic .
Solving issues
All these issues can be solved by engaging an adaptive digital workplace in the classroom. They offer user-friendly environments that integrate everything a teacher needs to do their job in one place, on any device and from any location within a school, college or university faculty.
A well-organised portal allows a teacher to find not just files and documents related to their lessons and lectures but also timetables, current and historic submissions and grades of work from students and records of absences. All this information will be available to them wherever in the world they are, on whichever device they want to access it from.
At their heart, adaptive digital workplaces must contain these elements that deliver value for the end user in the education sector:
- A calendar, a scheduling app and a system that allows IT service tickets to be issued and tracked
- MS Power apps, MS Power Automate, MS Office apps and a suitable document management system
- An activity feed showing tasks and notifications
- Intranet and communication tools
- Statistics and data tracking
- Customisable and personalised with shortcuts and iFrames.
Making the workplace a reality
Logging into an adaptive digital workplace is a refreshingly simple process. All the educational apps that each individual teacher needs to do their specific job will be waiting for them, so there is no need to sign into each one individually and there is no wastage. If a teacher doesn’t need to use an app or a program, it will not appear on their bespoke workplace. Everyone’s workplace is unique to them and only them.
The single sign-on process eliminates one of the biggest pain points a teacher faces as technology conspires against them. That statistic of possibly having to log into up to 30 apps each day disappears once the workplace is implemented as the preferred solution.
A similar headache of keeping track of documents is also considerably eased by using the digital workplace. There are many storage options facing teachers, with Sharepoint, Teams, Google Drive, One Drive, shared drives and Dropbox all being used in institutions. There are simply too many places where a document might be kept, or where access might be restricted, meaning efficiency is severely compromised. Discussions surrounding the implementation of a digital workplace can include the possibility of migration to a single storage solution, meaning everyone knows what is stored where.
Finally, the digital workplace brings the need for an intranet into the modern age. A teacher needs a place where they can share information with students but also find information that is relevant to them. The traditional intranet managed by either a communications professional or an information manager does not always fulfil this remit but integrating it into the digital workplace does.
Collaboration becomes much easier in the adaptive digital workplace that will be a key part of the school of the future, making them ideal for the role of the intranet. This combination of the two elements means that the teacher can focus on their work while being able to share and easily find information on the same platform used by students.
An adaptive digital workplace can’t control a disruptive pupil or calm a parent with an unreasonable belief that their child deserves preferential treatment ahead of another. However, it can make it much easier for teachers to deliver lessons and lectures with top-quality teaching materials that are close at hand and easily accessible. And anything that brings some clarity to a demanding profession is no bad thing.
