The Digital Mesh Powering Student Experiences
It's Madison's first day of graduate school, and she has a lot on her mind: the latest breakthrough in her research, her new position as a teaching assistant for the first-year programming class, and the esports team she is considering trying out for.
With so much to focus on, Madison should not have to worry about the mesh of digital services that enhance her learning experience.
From kindergarten to grad school, schools and higher education institutions rely on an interconnected web of owned and unowned tools to assure a seamless education experience. Whether video conferencing during a hybrid class, checking assignments on the school’s learning management system, or scanning into her on-campus apartment with her keycard, so much of Madison’s time at university depends on the health of the Internet and a myriad of SaaS applications.
If an Internet outage happens or performance dips at any point in this multifaceted service delivery chain, Madison’s school day may hit a roadblock or grind to a halt. That’s why it’s critical for IT teams at educational institutions to quickly mitigate—and proactively prevent—outages or disruptions.
Schools, colleges, and universities today need to provide their students—and faculty—with the enterprise-level digital experiences they expect in all other areas of life. Not only does this empower optimal learning and teaching, but it also helps maintain the school’s reputation as a cutting-edge educational institution, which is critical to retaining and attracting students.
In this blog post, we’ll walk with Madison through a typical day at university, covering some common ways outages can affect schools and higher education, and how IT teams can help minimize these impacts.
Assuring Digital Education Tools
Before Madison’s first class of the day, she logs into the university’s learning management system (LMS) to review the syllabus her professor uploaded in advance. She’s met with “service unavailable” messages.
Frustrated, Madison quickly messages the university IT team’s support chat to report the issue. It turns out that the university's third-party LMS provider is experiencing an outage. As a result, students can’t review course materials or upload assignments, and professors can’t enter grades or post materials.
In this situation, it was the LMS that encountered issues. Next time, it could be the student portal, the game server needed for esports team tryouts, or any of the other applications Madison, her classmates, and educators rely on.
In order to maintain the optimal learning environment, IT teams must assure great digital experiences and proactively guard against outages and degradations across all applications the school uses for learning, testing, communicating, and ensuring student well-being. To accomplish this goal, education IT teams have to keep track of an interconnected service delivery chain that relies on numerous disparate systems, many of which may lie outside their direct control. As a result, teams need deep visibility into both owned and unowned environments, so if outages occur at third-party providers (or within the education institution), they can efficiently identify the source of the problem and act to mitigate the impacts on students and staff. They should also have proactive monitoring to catch potential issues early and institute countermeasures.
This type of deep visibility is doubly important because outages are often merely functional rather than complete outages, making the cause harder to pinpoint, especially when the disruption is happening at a third-party service that the school’s IT team may not have full visibility into.
A service may look like it’s up and running, and everything on the status page will be green, but one critical component will be broken, rendering the whole service partially or totally unusable. For example, during a disruption that single sign-on service Okta experienced in March 2023, users could still sign in and access their Okta dashboard, but some of the application’s visual elements didn’t appear like they normally do, impacting the usability of the application. IT teams in the education space need to watch out for scenarios like this and holistically assess all signals to identify and address disruptions.
Providing A+ Hybrid Class Experiences
A bit flustered, Madison finally arrives at class. It’s a hybrid course, with virtual students video conferencing from around the world. After the lecture, the professor is wrapping up with a reminder about his virtual office hours when the video conference glitches and then cuts out entirely, ending the session prematurely for the virtual students.
This time, the issue turns out to be a network outage, rather than a problem with the video conferencing platform itself.
With many schools and higher education institutions offering virtual and hybrid programs, it’s essential for IT teams to assure quality digital experiences on video conferencing platforms and other necessary tools. Virtual and hybrid students deserve the same high-quality learning experiences as in-person students receive. If they’re constantly confronted with tech glitches that make them feel like second-class citizens, they may choose to transfer to another institution. As a result, guarding against and quickly mitigating outages or service disruptions is vital. IT teams need to have the visibility to find the cause of an outage and roll out backup plans if needed.
Hybrid and virtual learning presents a major opportunity for both students and schools. These programs make education accessible to students who may not otherwise have been able to attend due to work schedules, location, or other factors. These programs also represent an important opportunity for higher education institutions to extend their reach and expand enrollment. To make virtual or hybrid learning as successful as possible, the digital experiences must be top-notch.
In addition to empowering hybrid learning, video conferencing and other virtual communication tools are also essential for faculty and staff to collaborate effectively in a hybrid work world. Outages can impact this collaboration, as well as communication with research partners at other universities and other key stakeholders.
Maintaining Reliable School Infrastructure
On her way to the esports tryouts, Madison calls her brother who’s studying for his medical school exam. He’s taking the test via computer at an in-person testing location and is nervous the system might glitch during the exam.
It’s important that school, universities, and other education organizations make sure their network and systems are prepared for high-priority days like major exams, big sporting events, application deadlines, course enrollment periods, or other days when flawless digital experiences are even more critical and they may experience a large influx of traffic.
In advance of major events like these, IT teams should take steps to enhance their infrastructure and thoroughly test multiple scenarios to identify and mitigate any possible issues. All dependencies should be mapped out and each component of the service delivery chain understood. Education institutions should also have robust backup plans in place.
However, despite best efforts, sometimes outages or performance issues do still happen. As a result, IT teams also need to have comprehensive visibility and alerting in place so they can catch problems as soon as possible and take steps to resolve—hopefully before they impact students or staff.
Big games and critical exams aside, IT teams also need to maintain a reliable campus network and wireless experiences for users every day. Proactive monitoring and optimization are essential, ideally with automation where appropriate to help identify any issues more efficiently. Students need consistent connectivity throughout campus, and research universities also need to ensure that their infrastructure can support the massive workloads required for any AI-related research they might be doing.
Supporting Security & Student Well-being
Madison gets back to her on-campus apartment late after the evening’s esports tryouts and scans her keycard to enter the lobby.
She’s settled into study for a few hours before bed, when she gets a text from her roommate Alexis. Her keycard’s not working for some reason and she’s stuck outside. Madison hurries downstairs to let her in.
From keycard access and the third-party point of sale (POS) system in the dining hall to security cameras, so many of the services that support student well-being are digital. It’s incumbent on IT teams to make sure everything is functioning properly and quickly mitigate any issues if an outage happens.
Cyberattacks are also a very real threat. Schools and universities have extensive and highly varied potential points of entry into their environment, due to their incredibly mobile and distributed nature (virtual learning, etc.) and due to many students accessing school resources via their own personal devices. Each of these entry points represents a possible vulnerability that a bad actor may exploit.
Visibility across the full end-to-end service delivery chain can serve as an important adjunct to security efforts, allowing teams to quickly spot atypical performance and diagnose whether the root cause is a security breach or just an internal issue. This is what happened at Minnesota State University Moorhead earlier this year. The IT teams observed some unexpected performance in their server infrastructure. They proactively took servers, networks, and systems offline while they troubleshooted what might be going on and ultimately discovered that a handful of servers were infected.
Outage Monitoring Checklist: What Education Institutions Should Watch For
Managing the complex ecosystem of owned and unowned environments to provide excellent digital experiences for your students and staff is critical, but sometimes feels daunting.
To help guide your efforts, below is a suggested checklist of important areas that your IT team should consider prioritizing and recommended actions to take. For each item listed below, make sure you’re monitoring overall performance, including the health of relevant APIs, cloud services, and other tools necessary to maintain proper service functioning.
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Apps & Websites: Give students smooth learning experiences by emulating app service interactions to proactively spot potential issues and prevent outages. This helps you measure performance metrics like HTTP response and page load times to know what’s normal, and what might be a sign of a larger issue.
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Hybrid & Virtual Learning: Make sure remote and hybrid students (and staff) have the infrastructure they need for quality learning, teaching, and collaboration experiences. Proactively monitor things like VPN gateways, Wi-Fi, and VDI environments for any problems.
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Internet, Data Center, & DNS Providers: Establish monitoring for core IT services and applications throughout your infrastructure and cloud, from all areas of the campus or across multiple campuses if you are a multi-campus institution.
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SaaS: Maintain visibility into B2B connectivity and API performance from external services, such as POS, CRM, and reporting systems. Additionally monitor the software that students, instructors, and staff rely on like word processing applications and email.