Customer Overview
Catholic Education South Australia (CESA) is made up of the South Australian Commission for Catholic Schools (SACCS), Catholic Education Office of South Australia (CEO) and 103 Catholic schools across South Australia. The organisation comprises 6,000 staff who care for more than 48,000 students.
Business Situation
Catholic Education South Australia recently made the decision to offer the capabilities of Office 365 to its 103 schools across the state (including Exchange email, Lync, SharePoint and Office on Demand). As part of this offering, CESA sought to leverage Office 365 to provide each school with a portal for students and teachers to collaborate.
Solution
Kloud worked with CESA to ensure comprehensive understanding of the requirements and delivered a solution design document based on the needs of the organisation. Following acceptance of the design document, Kloud commenced configuration of the tenant (in particular SharePoint Online) in readiness for the deployment of to-be created templates. Kloud worked closely with the Learning and Technology Team to create conceptual designs for the following types of templates that would be used within each school portal:
- School
- Class
- Community
- Professional Learning.
From these designs Kloud developed prototypes in SharePoint and iteratively refined them with regular reviews from the Learning and Technologies Team. The final solution included a custom application which created the school sites in Office 365 and a remote provisioning application in Azure for self-service site creation. The latter provided teachers with a mechanism to create their own class, community and professional learning sites based on the predefined template which they could then fine-tune to suit their needs.
Benefits
The school portal empowers students and teachers to collaborate in a safe and well-monitored environment. They can now easily share documents, images and videos as well as create blogs or post questions in a single place.
Through the class sites, students will be able to spend their time collaborating with others in their class as well as teachers who will provide additional resources and oversight. The community sites allow students to join groups of interest, either social or academic, and is a great way for like-minded students to expand their learning or be more informed about what is happening. Likewise, the professional learning sites allow teachers to share ideas and resources about a subject or stream which will translate to better learning outcomes for students.
“CESA’s Learning and Technologies team worked with consultants from Kloud on the functionality and design of the Office 365 and SharePoint Online templates for schools. We were impressed by the communication and analytical skills used to meet our organisation’s needs and to inform its direction. High levels of expertise supported the project, as well as knowledge of the product, solid task prioritisation, budget management and timely reporting” – Karen Sloan, Learning and Technologies Senior Education Advisor, CESA.