Friday, March 29, 2024
HomeOffice 365Q&A: How to Handle Education Digitalisation

Q&A: How to Handle Education Digitalisation

Education institutes are accelerating their digitlisation efforts to get their community of students and faculty onto a holistic digital learning platform. Dynamic technology shifts are also challenging enterprises on the skill-sets readiness of their workforce, resulting in a need for effective corporate learning and training systems to address the skill gap and empower employees with the most relevant information to excel in their roles.

This involves re-defining processes such as:

  • Curriculum planning
  • Learning needs analysis
  • Lesson/course preparation and delivery
  • Collaboration between learners and educators
  • Grading
  • Communication
  • And more!

The challenge is to ensure every stakeholder’s core needs are addressed by the new platforms, and that it brings the maximum value, efficacy, and efficiency to this community of users. New system rollouts are mostly technically manageable, but the crux of a successful transformation lies in the people’s side of the transformation.

Read on as one of AvePoint’s Senior Strategic Consultants, Sohna Sukumaran Hemalatha, shares more on how to get users on board and championing the new system to effect long-lasting positive user outcomes, and find out how AvePoint can help boost the digital transformation value in your EduTech digitalisation initiatives here.

female student taking lessons from her math teacher over the internet picture id1306171110

Q: What are the top impeding factors for organisations from successfully rolling out their new digitalisation projects?

Not investing enough in change management efforts, and having the outlook that imparting training is all that is needed for users to move to a new system or technology. But I am actually happy to see organizations gradually shifting away from this outlook and realizing the importance and impact of considering change management in a new system or technology rollout.

When universities or schools implement a new LMS, there is a community of stakeholders to engage and train as new system users. Having a good change management strategy can turn these stakeholders into strong advocates for the new system and result in more efficient and successful user adoption.

Q: What are your top three tips for successful change management?

Every organization is different. A change practitioner should not have a one size fits all attitude. A change management strategy should always be tailor-made to the organization; it should work the best for the organization, the individuals in it, and resonate with their values and goals.

Always keep “people” at the centre of the change management process. Invest time in understanding how people in the organization will be affected by the change and design your change process around this to smoothly transition people to the new system or technology. Ensure that your communication plan is simple, straightforward, and created with end users in mind. For example, if you are preparing a user guide, make sure your users (students, faculty, administrators) get clear steps on how to get themselves onboarded to the new system and remove any tech jargon that may confuse them with info that does not directly impact their usage.

I also recommend scaling using change agents; it’s hard to reach out to everyone in an organization individually. Nurture and empower a champion community so your change efforts can be scaled and have a larger reach. These could be representatives from IT, Student Services, or Program Administrators who can help guide fellow users through the new enhanced system experience. Don’t forget to acknowledge and recognize your change champions.

microsoft teams

Q: What are the best indicators to track when measuring the effectiveness of new system rollouts?

Quantitative and qualitative measures always apply when it comes to measuring the success of a new system or technology rollout. For me, the most effective are user success stories. They are solid proof that people have used the system or technology & have achieved success from it – be it in terms of hours/resources saved or having achieved efficient methods of doing something.

For more on navigating education digitalization, check out the resources below:


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