In a recent post on EdTech: Focus on Higher Education, author Ryan Petersen writes, “[W]hen we focus too closely on the big picture, it’s easy to forget that our constituents experience campus technologies one interaction at a time.”
For Jordan Catling, Associate Director of Client Technology at the University of Sydney, that premise is always top of mind. For Jordan and his team, each interaction is at the center of the high-quality education experience the University of Sydney delivers to students around the world.
In the space of one week, Jordan and the team implemented a new digital technology solution that helped mitigate a series of complex unforeseen challenges. At issue was business readiness — or more specifically, education continuity. The University of Sydney serves around 70,000 students and staff. Thanks to bushfires, local flooding and the global outbreak of coronavirus, however, many students could not return to campus to study. The IT team needed to rapidly deploy online education alternatives that ensured students who were unable to return to campus due to travel restrictions were still able to continue their studies.
There were many considerations in choosing digital technology for the university. Seven key factors the team considered included:
- The digital technology must be agile, natural to use, and highly responsive to support the diverse ways in which different students learn.
- A digital solution should facilitate innovation. That meant that the IT team did not want to provide prescriptive guidance for its use.
- The technology should be provided by a business partner, working side by side with the university’s team to achieve deployment in record time and, at the same time, to engage in creative idea exchange relevant to future growth and expansion.
- The solution had to support delivery of an incredibly large number of course-specific applications, SaaS apps, and compute-intensive scientific and technical software programs typically used by students.
- The platform had to be secure, cloud-based and include a comprehensive product stack that provided a range of capabilities, from delivering virtual apps to managing network traffic to offering content collaboration capabilities and more.
- The solution needed to include analytical capabilities that could provide the IT team with visibility into the entire environment so they could ensure that everything was working as it should be.
- The digital technology environment had to be easy for the IT team to manage — and it needed to include such things as a single management dashboard, the ability to quickly onboard users, the promise of delivering a consistent, familiar student experience and the ability to be easily modified as the university’s needs evolve. In Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Citrix Workspace, the team found these attributes and more.
To learn more about the University of Sydney implementation, read the case study here, and learn more about Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Citrix Workspace.
