Cover story: Technology roundtable

MEET THE EXPERTS

Gordon Stewart - chief information officer - IT, GEMS Education
David Isaac - head of information technology, Taaleem
Andrew Turner - Head of education technology, Aldar Academies
Dr Pablo Fetter - CEO, Kings' Education
Steven Bambury - head of digital learning and innovation, JESS


Which school management systems do your schools use?

Gordon Stewart: At GEMS Education all of our schools use the in-house system, called OASIS, which originally stood for Online Administration School Information System. But over the years, each school has also implemented a school management system specific to its curriculum. We use Capita SIMS for English, we use Admin Plus in the American schools, and iSAMS and ManageBac for the IB school. All of the mid-market schools just use OASIS.

Andrew Turner: At Aldar Academies we currently use the same system across all seven schools, which has been designed by Double First and is called Engage. We've got one central system that's split across seven sites.

David Isaac: At Taaleem we recently rolled out a new student management system, which is iSAMS. We also use ManageBac for the IB curriculum, and we've got a software called Naviance as well for our US curriculum schools. We had a three-year long pilot — iSAMS piloted the system at Dubai British School, and they've got this integration with ManageBac at the moment, so that's really what made us go with them for a school-wide approach. We moved away from having our own in-house student management system to iSAMS, and we're quite happy with it.

Gordon: We are looking at whether it's practical to end up with smaller sub sets of school management systems, and iSAMS has been mentioned as the most common SMS.

Pablo Fetter: At Kings' we have one system for all our schools, Engage, which we use for student management. But we have been diversifying our exposure to other vendors for more niche areas such as performance management and things like that.

Steven Bambury: JESS used to use SIMS across the board, both in the primary and secondary schools, and in the last two or three years we switched to iSAMS. The way that iSAMS works and its features are more suited towards what JESS needed.

Is there a reason why you use multiple systems across schools?

Gordon: It's partly because most of the systems are built specifically for a particular curriculum. For instance, SIMS is built particularly for the National Curriculum of England. The way you structure your classes and the way you mark is a bit different in each curriculum, and therefore you need to use slightly different systems. Also, a lot of it is driven by the preferences of the school. If you go into an English school, most of the staff would have come from using SIMS. So if you've got 6,500 teachers, and 3,000 of those have probably worked in a school that uses SIMS, and then we say we're going to use something different, it's a challenge as well to change.

David: There are also factors such as the billing cycle. The important part is the integration with all the other systems. Gordon: The size of the school makes a difference as well. You might be able to get something that's very economical that works quite well for a school with 500 students, but perhaps that won't work so well with 10,000 students.

Andrew: Accessibility is another factor — if you've got 6,000 teachers accessing it on a daily basis, is it going to be hosted on-site? Is it going to be cloud-based? How long does it take to access it?

Gordon: That also raises the legacy trap — when you've done that customisation, you've invested in training everybody, integrating it with your finance system, with your virtual learning environment, and then to come along and change it is a big thing. So sometimes you're just using what you're using because everyone's used to it.

David: I think as more schools adopt iSAMS — and they're marketing it quite aggressively in the UAE — they seem to be capable of adapting to multiple curriculums. The only issue I had with the iSAMS contract is they don't have SIMS support. They have a relationship with ManageBac in Singapore, but they should have a presence in the UAE.

Steven: You also have to consider the support they offer. I think one of the things that JESS liked about iSAMS was the ability to customise. If there's something we want, iSAMS will build it for us. There are bespoke elements within it for us.

Gordon: For a long time, GEMS has had a balance between corporate diktat and allowing the schools to do their own thing and innovate. Historically, there was no big reason to force schools to use one system. So you end up allowing schools to make a choice that they believe is the right one for them. As things get more and more complicated, that becomes an issue, so we're looking at it now.

David: Standardisation is expensive. If you're trying to standardise, it's going to cost you money. Taaleem made the decision to go with one system, purely because with schools being autonomous and being allowed to make their own decisions with the student management systems, you end up with these legacy systems, and then you audit everyone and you realise gaps in the information.

How do you consolidate the information if schools are using different systems?

Gordon: This year we're launching an initiative to sort that problem out. At the moment what happens is… for example a school might use iSAMS for its day to day operations. But we also require some information centrally — we want to keep a view of all students and parents, we have to do KHDA and MOE reporting — so all of that has to come to the centre. So either a school will rekey all that information into our corporate system OASIS, or they just won't enter that information into the local system at all, and then you get this fractured system where you're doing part of the operations on SIMS or ManageBac or what have you, and then you're doing part of the operations on OASIS, and that's not particularly efficient, so we've got to find a way to fix that.

And how are you fixing that problem?

Gordon: We are fixing it by looking at whether we can ideally have one, maybe two or three school management systems, but the main thing is to integrate them together, and that's where you get into this integration investment, where we're going to spend some money integrating SIMS into Microsoft Dynamics, integrating iSAMS into Microsoft Dynamics, potentially putting something else with Microsoft Dynamics, and that locks us in for the next couple of years because we've spent all that time and effort and funding.

David: We're looking at doing something similar. We've decided on one single platform, one single student management system that's rolled out and operational now for all our schools. We all have the same problem with KHDA reporting and DSIB inspections, so we have to present to an ever-changing rubric from the KHDA. So having that central information is critical for us. We're putting a BI layer on top of that — we're doing an MIS route on top of it; each one is physically separate. So we're drilling into each school system and each school database to extract the MIS and use it as a wrapper.

Andrew: At Aldar each of our main databases are specific to the schools. However, at HQ, we go into all the separate databases. So across all our sites, we have standardised report templates, so we can compare both within our organisation and to ADEC requirements.

David: You've got a good situation where you've got your master data sorted so your data sources aren't changing. When you've got IB curriculum, US curriculum, UK curriculum… the structure of the data changes as well. It wouldn't be possible to pull those same reports, it's not a one-size fits all.

Andrew: It's the modules — they use built-on modules with very specific elements on the MIS for you. So when we diversify in terms of curriculum, we then go off and sync with Engage, which is the epicentre for our data, and then we diversify via the other systems. I think it doesn't matter what you use; because there are so many different reporting standards, no system at the moment has everything. If there was a software that did everything, I think we'd all be using the same company.

What support do vendors offer? Are they recommending which systems would work best for your groups during the decision-making process?

Andrew: The support the vendor offers is a massive selling point — how you can access them, can they use remote desktop, can you contact them, do they have international numbers. For example Double First have user groups in the MENA region. They come over once a year and get everyone in the MENA region together to share best practice.

Steven: iSAMS came out last year and trained a member of our admin team, and she's now our iSAMS coordinator for the Arabian Ranches and Jumeirah schools – she's received extensive training on how to run the back-end aspects. She's become our first point of call when there's something we need regarding iSAMS, and then if she needs something, she then goes directly to them.

Andrew: Within our network we have user groups as well. We'll get people from every site come together and train them extensively on the system; they share best practice as well. One of the major things with an MIS or any IT system is the training — a lot of people forget about that.

David: At Taaleem, every school has a head of technology integration who is responsible for integrating technology in the classrooms, and also managing student data as well. I have a team at the central office looking after group IT, and then each school has IT technicians to do the infrastructure, the platform level maintenance, and then the head of technology integration is really there to make sure that we get the best use of our collaboration space or blended learning classrooms.

Are most of your systems cloud-based or on premise? What drives that decision?

David: We specifically looked at the cloud implementation of iSAMS this year. Our proof of concept schools are on premise, but our strategy is to move more to cloud than on premise.

Gordon: All of our systems are on premise. We looked at the cloud a year or two ago. We don't have anything against the cloud, and it's potentially very attractive. One of the things for us was that our CEO at the time had a specific view that the data should be kept within the UAE. If we had the conversation again now, I think it would be slightly different. There's no real driver to stick it in the cloud. Generally you stick things in the cloud because they're cheaper one way or another, but at the moment that's not the case. Now maybe if we standardise the solution, then iSAMS in the cloud might be the way forward.

David: We went through an IT strategic review last year run by KPMG, and out of it came the fact that we have so many silos of information, and network infrastructure was really expensive. So looking at the investment, with cloud it's a different funding model, it's a little bit more attractive for us to do that. And there's the security element — as you move up from infrastructure as a service, and you go to platform as a service or software as a service, the responsibility of data security and things like that is pushed back to the vendor, which we like.

How are you keeping your networks safe from viruses or security breaches on student devices?

Gordon: That really comes down to making sure that you've segregated the infrastructure. Most schools here have a BYOD wi-fi segment, that a student is attached to. We wouldn't have them attaching to the core infrastructure, because once they're in it, they're really in it. We're just about to roll out some additional cyber security software that sits on every single GEMS-owned device. It's licensed to also sit on BYOD, but that's a massive task because students can have any device. They can have an iPad Pro with 120GB RAM in it, or they can have a Taiwanese Android 2.0 clone. How can you be sure the software works on both, or is available on both… and even if you get it installed, how do you make sure it stays installed? It's their device; they can do what they want with it. Managing the student device is a massive undertaking and I'm not too sure we'd go that way.

David: You've got this choice where you either say you're going to give access to a separate VLAN, which is the way Taaleem do it at the moment, so you're on a different network and you can't access the back-end system. Or you go down the route of having managed devices with all these different solutions to really restrict and manage who is on the network. The whole remit then just becomes so much more difficult to manage and administer. It becomes not so viable really for larger school groups; $20 a device is quite a large budget really to manage just one tiny aspect of running a school.

Pablo: It's the same with us, students don't have access to back-end systems. They have access to the internet, which is filtered.

Is there certain software that students are required to download to protect devices from malware?

Gordon: You can't force them. You can advise, and that comes under digital citizenship and making students and parents aware of the risks involved and the steps they should take, but you can't enforce it onto a device that they own.

David: Unless you go for an expensive mobile device management solution that will tell you if you've got a cracked defence or something that falls under the definition of a virus. You can get it if you pay the money for it, but it's an expensive luxury and really if you just separate your LAN and offer access through a firewall anyway, then if they bring in something and it is potentially malicious, then it's restricted to one area, and core business operations don't get affected.

Gordon: There's another challenge there with VPNs. You can segregate your network and have a dedicated student VLAN, then you put firewalls to restrict people using certain sites, but unfortunately, students know how to use VPNs. There's a constant race to secure your network against the latest piece of VPN. It happens within the UAE — everyone has VPN even though it's not technically allowed.

David: BYOD is a really thorny subject, and even more so in the UAE I think. It would be lovely if one of the vendors came up with a cost-efficient solution for us to manage this. But, I think they see it's education, they look at the school fees, especially for private schools and immediately think of us as cash cows they can milk.

Are there any open platforms or software that you have had success with?

Andrew: That was something we wanted to look into. That's why we've gone with Office 365. So across platforms, across devices, our students and staff can download the full Office suite for free. That's how we try to have the software available for the students.

Gordon: What about Google?

Andrew: We looked at Google, we do pilot schemes, so we looked at LMSs, and Google certainly has a lot of functionality for a third party. However, a lot of functionality with that comes from Gmail, and for an organisation that's been Microsoft with Outlook and Exchange, you're looking at a big change there. If you've got two different systems — Gmail and an Outlook — which one are you going to tell your staff members to use?

Gordon: We do the same thing, which is the free Microsoft Office for everybody, so every student has an Office email account, but we still have a lot of Google Docs and that's because people have been using Google Docs and collaboration elements of that for years, and they've got tons of lesson planning materials in there. They're not going to sit down and convert that all over to Office. So we're promoting Office, but we've still got a lot of Google in there.

David: We're the same — we've got lots of legacy resources sitting with teachers in Taaleem that have been developed on Google Docs. We are Office 365, so I'm trying to convert everyone to OneNote for Classroom. Microsoft are really focusing on this.

Andrew: April this year was a real game changer — Microsoft released Microsoft Classroom and Microsoft Forms. Most of our staff have predominantly got Microsoft documents, so for us it's a fresh slate to move forward. It would have been a different story if they didn't release it in April. And also Office 365 is restricted to your organisation, but on Google it's not that easy to download all your documents, so if a staff member or student leaves, and they've got 16GB of storage on your system… and there are lots of different ways to download, so you might not get the documents in a format you can use.

Gordon: You can't even get the document unless they give it to you if it's on a private account. If someone is storing everything on their Gmail account or Google Docs account, you have no right to go take it. You can set up a school Gmail account, but if people are using their personal accounts and personal storage, which they've been doing for years, moving from school to school, it's theirs, and you can't demand it.

Andrew: With Google you can download Google Drive onto a laptop — we don't allow any of that. The only thing we allow is OneDrive for Business, which is managed within our domain.

David: The way we've planned it is OneDrive and Office 365 is for personal storage. If a teacher is creating a class note or resources, they use OneNote so they can share the resource with the class. When they leave, that's on a Taaleem-managed account, so we have a degree of ownership of it. Yes, they've created it, but we own it, so we've got a little bit more control. For a school, to add another level to it, we have Share Point that we are rolling out for school level documents. On a personal level, I believe in cloud storage more than investment in on premise solutions, so we are pushing things to cloud storage.

Andy: Plus there's the amount of storage as well that you get per user on the cloud. As a school it's all about the bottom line, and you're getting one 1TB per user for OneDrive, and even more for Share Point. It's a massive amount of data, and if you try to do that on premise, the cost is crazy, and so is the amount of backup and all the different systems. So for that it makes sense, but it's also how you manage it. Because all these things have just come out in the last six months, all schools are now trying to work out how they're going to manage the data they put into their organisation, because ultimately if a teacher leaves, it's part of the contract that they made that resource while within our school group, and it is added value to us. In the past, they had everything on a hard drive they could take with them.