It’s hard to overestimate the quantum of change that the Australian education sector has undergone over the past couple of years, let alone what still lies ahead.

As researchers from UniSA’s Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning (C3L) state, “Never in the history of education has online learning been so important.”

“Australia is in the middle of a massive shift to online and digital learning, which means that schools need to think about how they can integrate suitable technologies into their teaching. Education systems are feeling pressured to initiate change and modernise teaching… They also know that they need to make big decisions around innovation and technology but starting this process can be overwhelming.”

Many schools and learning institutions have turned to cloud services, and often specific education technology or edtech tools, to enable new digital learning opportunities for students.

With remote learning now part of school curricula from primary school through university, concerted efforts are underway to improve the digital learning experiences of students across the board.

Sizing the market in Australia, there are said to be 600 edtech companies generating “$2.2 billion worth of direct revenue annually.” The market is worth even more, however, as users of edtech tools need some non-education specific, foundational technology elements such as flexible, high-bandwidth networks to be able to participate in the opportunities that edtech brings.

In the past two years, there has been a concerted effort on the part of state and territory education agencies to upgrade the raw bandwidth available to schools.

But for schools, universities and other institutions that are increasingly reliant on digital learning management systems, edtech platforms and collaboration apps required for class participation and report writing, there is a rolling need to ensure that the underlying network is agile, resilient and easy to manage.

As an ACS report into the sector this year recommended, “Schools and school systems should implement annual equipment, software and network audits in line with industry-wide norms, to ensure frontline teachers have the requisite resources to effectively teach computer education subjects and the digital literacy curriculum.”

The same audits would benefit all learning opportunities that are enhanced with the use of digital technologies. The ACS found only “18% of schools overall reported extensive use of technologies within all subject areas.” This is clearly an area of education where digital use will evolve, and that increased usage will need to be appropriately supported by strong technology and network foundations.

The opportunities for SD-WAN in schools

A foundational technology that is emerging as a digital enabler in school and university ICT environments is software-defined wide area networking, abbreviated to SD-WAN.

ICT administrators are embracing new network architectures that use SD-WAN capabilities to ensure compliance with service level agreements (SLAs) for network uptime, application optimisation, and resilience. These are all key considerations when supporting critical education workloads and student cohorts.

Student life, especially in higher education and with students connecting from all over the world, makes education a 24/7 proposition. As homework and additional learning resources may be hosted in a cloud-based learning management system, accessed by learners outside of school hours, it is important that ICT systems and networks are capable of running optimally at all times of day and evening.

Students and staff expect to be able to connect to the school network with their devices from on- or off-campus, and SD-WAN is a critical enabling technology in school environments to enable that. Indeed, SD-WAN can easily extend to student laptops and devices.

SD-WAN also allows local break-out for cloud services and helps educational institutions reduce bandwidth costs. Local break-out shortens the path for traffic between the school or learner, and the cloud-based system or edtech platform they are interacting with.

The alternative has traditionally been for a school to have to pass all traffic through a central point and then out to the cloud and back, which lengthens the distance the traffic has to travel, introducing latency and degrading the overall digital learning experience for students.

For digital learning opportunities to be integrated across the spectrum of subjects, school administrators need to be confident that digital elements can be folded seamlessly into the existing curricula structure. If the digital systems perform slowly, they will simply not get used, and that would be to the detriment of all students.

As with other industry verticals, there is a paramount need for security and straightforward management of the networks that underpin digital experience. Application-aware and identity-based steering policies ensure that live-streamed classes or education content can gain priority over less critical traffic. Additionally, although campus environments may require network segmentation, SD-WAN allows for easier management of the whole network environment.