Effective communication among various stakeholders in the education ecosystem can have a positive impact on students’ achievements. But, Parents have faced multiple communication challenges with school in the remote learning model. Only 30% of the parents, whose kids received online instructions, are very satisfied with the way school handled communication, according to the Pew Research survey. In this article, we list the key challenges to parent-teacher communication and ways to overcome them.

Challenges and Recommendations

Limited time & capacity

Effective engagement with parents gets hindered when they struggle to combine their professional and personal obligations. This becomes especially challenging for single parents and full-time working parents who have either young children or multiple children. Some parents also lament the diversified platforms or varying systems used in schools.

Recommendations

1. Flexible communication schedules can help meet parents’ requirements such as time constraints.
2. Online survey tools can help schools learn about parents’ availability and time constraints. They can help schools collate responses from parents and turn them into actionable programs. 
3. Virtual meeting tools such as SchoolCloud Parents Evening can arrange for staff-parents meetings virtually. 
4. Consider investing in an app for parents if your institution has not done that already. Such apps enable parents to receive instant updates on mobile without accessing their inbox.  
5. Use of chatbots, mobile apps, websites can be used to support communication with parents. Emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality- Virtual Reality, and 360-degree imagery are efficient tools.
6. Quality over quantity of communication will help get focussed and positive attention from parents.

Varied level of Education amongst parents

The confidence of parents in supporting their children at home varies with their education levels. Parents schooled beyond high school feel more confident and prepared to support children in remote learning with ed-tech tools. A recent study from the Netherlands highlights that less-educated parents could be less supportive of their children in remote learning, and the reason is partly that they feel less capable of helping them. Such parents also represented a negative attitude towards learning themselves thus hindering communication in online systems.

Recommendations

1. Getting to understand and know parents will help schools open channels of communication. 
2. Encouraging open dialogue during parents’ evenings or review meetings will help build trust among parents. 
3. Giving 1:1 reassurance that the goal of the school is to work collaboratively will help parents in supporting interactions better. 
4. Easy Instructional resources such as short videos, sample answers, and visual instructions could help brief parents in assisting in-home learning.

Lack of Internet access & digital skills

20% of the LearnLab surveyed students in 22 school districts of Kansas City had no access to the Internet. This not only makes them miss the opportunity of virtual learning but also leads to a divide in parents’ experience. Such families often remain disconnected from the school and have under-representation among parents’ sentiment feedback.

Similarly, the Ofcom report shows that 9% of the UK students had no access to a computer device at home and over 880,000 live in houses without an internet connection. Parents’ lack of digital skills is another barrier that makes them feel incapable of supporting online instructions from schools.

Recommendations

1. Reducing the need for home connectivity can help bridge the digital divide.  
2. Making instructional materials downloadable will help parents who lack internet access but have mobile devices. 
3. Continuing to maintain paper-based communication will ensure inclusivity for those who lack devices.
4. Getting educational channels that deliver instructional content and assistive technology could help parents support their children better. 
5. Coaching parents on ed-tech tools through orientation and forging partnerships with ed-tech providers can also help ill-equipped parents.
6. Consulting parents on tech implementation decisions is essential. parents should have the freedom to choose ed-tech tools that they are most comfortable with.

English language proficiency

Parents with English as an additional language (EAL) may feel under-confident in interacting with school or getting involved in the education of their children. Parents with EAL and limited language proficiency may be deterred from text messages, emails, and newsletters from schools.

Recommendations

1. Allow native language communication with interpreter apps. 
2. Getting translation apps and services for better communication.
3. Investing in school communication apps with multi-language support.
4. Keep it simple by avoiding educational jargon, figurative language, or idioms that may be misunderstood by parents.

Conclusion

Technology can drive change and improve the operating model of the education ecosystem in simplifying parent-school communication. CIOs should understand and communicate the impact that technology makes on new and evolving ways of education digitization. Implementing these recommendations with a solid communication strategy can help build trust amongst parents in the remote learning environment.

On International Women’s Day 2022, I had an opportunity to interview a ‘super-lady’ from our team- Indra Patil, Software Development Engineer. Indra joined Valuebound on July 17, 2019, and has the success of VB360, our in-house transparent management system product to her credit alongside her team. Indra was also awarded the ‘CEO Excellence Award’ 2022 during Valuebound Annual event recently. Here’s a sneak peek into my conversation with Indra about her work and life.

Given the complexities and responsibilities squared on women’s shoulders, how difficult is it to maintain a work-life balance, especially in remote working scenarios?

Indra: Every woman juggles through her day to strike a perfect equilibrium between work and family while both of them are of utmost importance to her. When COVID-19 hit, the company took one of the wisest decisions to go 100% remote. Even though it’s challenging to handle my 4-year-old daughter in a remote working scenario, I’m still happy to work in perfect harmony of career, and personal life.

What is one quality that sets you apart from others?

Indra: Perseverance, and the ability to take on the challenges head-on. I think that’s my greatest strength, and it also sets me apart from others. I value time and thus ensure that I use it wisely even in my spare time. The tech industry is an incredibly exciting place to be at. I took a step into this unique world, and trusted that I could make a difference with my skills. I’m making each day count!

Do you feel that being a female you had to work harder for career advancement?

Indra: It’s not hard to answer that question, because I don’t believe that I’ve to work more arduously than my male colleagues. I don’t see it like that, for that matter. I have hardly seen my competition as male versus female. I think it’s more of a competition about you becoming better than the former you. Or, it could be seen as a competition of human personalities.

On International women’s day, what would be your advice to younger women entering the workforce today?

Indra: My sincere advice to younger women out there is to be free of the bias in your head. Do not enter the world with a judgment of men versus women, because when you do that, you’re being unfair to yourself. However, I also strongly believe that irrespective of gender, everyone’s feelings are valid. ‘The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is also Break The Bias, and it absolutely resonates with my thoughts right now.

Secondly, no matter how cliche it sounds, always believe that you can achieve anything- the power to accumulate and apply knowledge and experience is in your own hands.

How do you think Valuebound invests itself in the development of women leaders?

Indra: Women have an excellent gender representation on Valuebound’s headcount, and there aren’t any glass ceilings here. Valuebound always gives equal opportunities to grow and enhance capabilities by investing itself in three core principles - Empathy, Excellence, and Continuous learning- all of which, I believe, are paramount to creating great leaders- whether men or women.

Being felicitated with this year's CEO Excellence Award is a great motivation for me. I take pride in being a Valuebound employee, which is also a GPTW-certified organization.

There are over 1.6 billion students across 150 countries who have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in the last two years, according to recent reports by The World Bank. As an immediate response to recurrent lockdowns, Institutions adopted e-learning or remote learning solutions. To simplify e-learning, there has been a significant surge in online learning tools supporting video conferencing, learning applications, and virtual tutoring. India’s Ed-Tech journey dates back to 1990’s with the launch of companies like Educomp. In this blog, we shall discuss the rise of e-learning, the response of ed-tech companies to cater to the education market, challenges and solutions around online classrooms.

Response of Ed-Tech to cater education sector

The development of next-gen advanced learning technologies to cater to the rising remote learning landscape is an immediate response of ed-tech companies. There has been a dramatic increase in AI-based learning applications, mobile learning firms, and mostly ed-tech unicorns. To put this in perspective, the world online education market is projected to reach $350 Billion in the next three years. The investments made in the ed-tech companies reached a historic height of $18.66 Billion in 2019.

In response to the rising demand for online learning models, various education technology companies like BYJU’s and Tencent classroom, have seen a significant rise. After the Government in China instructed about a quarter of one billion full-time students to begin online studies, Tencent Classroom saw 81% of K-12 students attending online school in Wuhan.

Video conferencing apps for teacher-student interaction and collaboration, real-time project co-editing, calendar scheduling, and auto-translation apps are other tools that bolster education capabilities. Rise of the digital options, engineering capabilities, and distance learning solutions to cater to the rising demand of e-learning are some of the immediate responses amidst and above lockdowns.

Emerging evidence of the effectiveness of remote learning during the pandemic has led to a rapid revolution of the education sector, but will the hybrid model of education sustain, or emerge? Some suggest that unplanned e-learning with little preparation, no training, and limited bandwidth is unconducive for sustained growth. This poses some challenges of e-learning that still need to be tackled.

Challenges of e-learning

Among the key challenges of online education are-

Technological limitations

No training, limited bandwidth, and lesser preparation especially in remote locations are among the major constraint of online classrooms. The disparity among students regarding access to necessities for e-learning, like a computer device, and internet connection are among the key challenge. In Austria, Norway, and Switzerland some 95% of the students have access to a computer, while in Indonesia only 34% can get this accessibility, according to the data from OECD. Difficulties with modern technology include installation issues, downloading errors, audio and visual problems, login issues, and more. Technical problems, and difficulty in understanding key instructional goals form major barriers in remote learning.

Limitation with students’ learning capabilities

Students with limited learning capabilities or disadvantaged backgrounds struggle to adapt to e-learning methodology. UNICEF data shows that as many as 463 million children could not adapt to online education due to economic disadvantage. A major portion of students across the world find e-learning boring. Among 21,678 U.S. high school students surveyed by Yale, about 75% had a negative self-reported feeling regarding remote learning. A chunk of students feels disengaged or bored about 60% of the time (refer to Fig.1).

Limitations at the teachers’ end

Exhausted teachers are another factor that must be considered while talking about the obstacles of e-learning. Lack of personal attention and absence of two-way interaction is another key challenge of e-learning methodology. Mediocre content of course curriculum adds to major issue as well. There’s also a lower level of preparedness among students, and also some teachers regarding the use of Learning Management Systems (LMS). Building a positive learning attitude among students is a key challenge of e-learning, especially for the teachers.

Solutions to Challenges

While building a digital education ecosystem seems the only possible solution right now, e-learning is perhaps only 10% of the whole scenario. Digital education shouldn’t be solely seen in reference to technologies and innovative solutions but must be able to include other critical areas regarding all levels of education. Some of the possible solutions to key challenges of e-learning are-

Building an all-inclusive academic infrastructure

A digital education ecosystem must be inclusive of a robust academic infrastructure that does not remain confined to labs or virtual classrooms, but also include examination conducting, admissions, and providing analytics and insights to parents and students. The education industry also must weave elements of alumni connections, incubation, internships, and placements in the ecosystem.

Focusing on students’ and teachers’ needs

Sustaining non-cognitive skills like motivation, goals, and personality traits, among students should be a focus since these factors can create a direct and positive result in context with socio-economic outcomes. An effective hybrid digital education model must incorporate technology-based interaction among students and teachers for higher engagement. Online course curriculum must include dynamic, interactive, and more interesting activities to hone students’ skills. Content relevance, effective strategies, and group-based activities can help in enriching content. Humanizing learning processes and using group forums or social media for interaction can help in 1:1 communication amongst students, teachers, and parents.

Adopting innovative technological approach

Innovative pedagogies for education delivery, certifications, assessments, student administration, industry and governance linkage, campus activities, and alumni engagement, must be implemented. Fixing technical issues with content testing, pre-recorded video lectures, and having Plan B in place can be the possible solutions. Finding solutions by focusing on pedagogical issues, and laying greater emphasis on case learning, collaborative learning, and project-based online instruction can go a long way. While Edtech cannot replace personal interaction, it can contribute to instruction enhancement to make content delivery interesting, and engaging. Governments must work to bring down the digital divide by focusing on threefold objectives- equity, accessibility, and quality.

Conclusion

The EdTech sector has boomed in the wake of rising online education amidst pandemics. By 2021, the Edtech sector reached about 2 billion dollars, and continue to rise this year and beyond, according to Google and KPMG reports. However, the challenge of the education sector doesn’t just remain confined to finding new technologies, but also reviving the whole digital education ecosystem with reimagination. Helping students, teachers, and also parents with digital literacy, especially in remote and inaccessible regions is the key here. 
 

Consistent evolution in the digital world has led to technological change in the education and assessment industry as well. The global EdTech investments reached USD 18.66 billion in 2019. Vendors experienced a further rising demand for digital education solutions after the onset of COVID, in 2020.

Research Gate surveyed students’ attitudes toward online exams across four faculties- Management and Economics, Interdisciplinary Studies, Humanities, and Technical Sciences. The proportion of “Very Positive” responses from Interdisciplinary Studies, and Technical Sciences was on the higher side, as depicted in Fig. 1.

In 2019, 37.4 million students had enrolled for higher education. The online education market in India is expected to grow by 14.33 billion dollars in the next 4 years. The seriousness of adopting online examination in India can be understood from the fact that almost all the competitive exams adopted the online CBT examination system. But what makes online examinations so popular now? In this article, we discuss the future of the online examination system with a focus on functionalities, advantages, and barriers.

Functionalities of online examination methodology

By understanding the basic functionalities, we can move towards the advantages and limitations of the online examination system.

• Creating examinations

Before conducting the examination, an exam paper needs to be created. Examination software, apps, and platforms are equipped with a range of features, such as question bank management, test engines, and more. Such features enable hosting different kinds of exams with multiple sets of papers, and level of difficulty.

• Conducting examinations

Conducting an examination could be a tedious task, since it requires filling students’ data, such as registration, exam proctoring, seating arrangement, and examination venue. Online registration portals and online proctoring can help in conducting examinations hassle-free.

• Assessing examinations

Online systems can assess and generate candidates’ reports and results automatically. The majority of examination evaluation tools come with AI features that prevent errors. On evaluation, detailed reports are generated, which consist of topic-wise, subject-wise, test-wise, and question-wise analysis of exam papers.

Advantages of online examination system

• Reduced burden of administration

The need to print and circulate question papers, organize logistics to transport these question papers, and have invigilators at the examination center makes the entire process costly and burdensome. But, the completely automatic nature of online examinations makes them useful and highly accurate. This eliminates the hassle of the pen-and-paper mechanism.

• Eases examination-related requirements

Conducting examinations through digital means makes it simpler for the conducting body to manage the tasks associated with organizing. In conventional examination methods, handling question papers and answer sheets becomes a tedious and expensive job since a lot of manpower may be needed. However, with the online examination system, question papers are created easily using automated tools. This eases the job of those who create the paper once an assessment organization approves the question bank. Results are also generated quickly and communicated in detail to the examination-takers.

• Scalable worldwide reach

Unlike traditional examination mechanisms, students need not travel to the examination center using digital methods because online examinations break the barriers of geographical boundaries. Remote proctoring is another benefit of online examination because online exams can be easily conducted with transparency, and fear of unfair practices.

• Other benefits

From the students’ perspective, some of the other benefits of the online examination system according to the Research Gate survey include faster results, time-saving, improved structure, readability, and correction possibilities, interesting, better, and convenient ideas, environment-friendly, and being up-to-date. The same is indicated in Fig.2.

Barriers of online examination system

• Network concerns

Connectivity forms the major challenge of conducting online examinations. Network issues can delay or postpone examinations. This can affect a student’s mind negatively.

• Security concerns

In a system of online examination, data is either shared online, or in cloud storage. However, a digital ecosystem brings the threat of hacking and data breaches. Security threats are especially worrisome for the examination system because it involves leaking question papers, which can sabotage the sanctity of the mechanism. Online examinations are excellent for multiple-choice question patterns. But they still need to be developed for descriptive or broad question-types.

• Accessibility in remote geographical regions

Reaching out in rural geographical locations is still a daunting task, especially where the students are economically downtrodden. Lack of accessibility of computers and networks in such regions poses a major barrier to implementing online examinations completely.

• Other barriers

Some of the other barriers of the online examination system, as reported by students in the Research Gate survey include more time requirements, lack of structure, problems with question types, longer preparation time, and trouble with typing. Some of the students also feel that online examinations involve more costs than benefits. Fig. 3 below depicts the same-

Conclusion

There are various ways for management to gauge the viability of the online examination system. There are instructive establishments that use technology to approach the online examination system through enlisting, evaluation, expense installment, or simply observing and smoothing the process. Online audit, use of webcam, amplifiers, and controller as a means of sorting technique can help in playing out reviews.

When implemented properly, these solutions can help in providing a range of improvements in contrast to conventional methods, because of their automated mechanisms and robust processing. In the upcoming days, innovation in technology and ed-tech companies will ensure much more development for a smooth operative experience in the online examination system.

Gartner defines gamification as “the use of game mechanics and experience design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals.” According to Gartner’s definition, there’s a clear difference between gamification, and video games or loyalty programs, because gamification uses techniques that nudge people to achieve set goals.

The University of Chicago has an interesting perspective towards gender loyalty for gamification. Statistics show that adult women gamers can outnumber men under the age group of 18 years. This shows that gamification is gender-neutral and has a wide appeal to engage everyone. If designed well, and with engaging features, gamification has a huge potential and scope in keeping learning fun and relevant due to similarities with learning.

Gamification and Learning: The Similarities

Many fundamentals of gamification and learning are the same, which is why more educators are exploring the scope of gamification in making learning an automatic, fun, and relevant process. By understanding the scope of gamifying education, educators are exploring the possibility of applying elements of games in situations that are non-gaming per se. These elements can motivate or influence students’ behavior.

Three core elements of games (Fig. 1) that are particularly relevant to education include-

• Mechanical Elements like instant feedback, onboarding, and incremental progression
• Personal Elements like rankings or leader-boards, visibility and status, and collective responsibility, and,
• Emotional Elements include the psychological flow of emotions.

Fig. 1: Source

The University of Chicago shows a simple comparison in the table below explaining striking similarities between gaming and learning activities.

Gamification	Learning
Exploring new world	Exploring new subject or topic
Quests	Learning Objectives
Earning points or badges	Getting grades or awards
Social interaction due to collaboration and competition	Social interaction due to collaboration and competition
Learning from failures	Learning from failures
Time limit and stress	Assignment deadlines and pressure

 

Advantages of Gamification in Education

Gamification in learning or education comes with “four freedoms of play,” as defined by the Creative Director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Education Arcade, Scot Osterweil. These are also categorized as advantages of applying the mechanics of gamification in education.

Freedom to Fail

Humans have a natural tendency to avert failures. This is specifically applicable to students at school, who tend to avoid failures due to fear of real consequences such as lesser marks even in minor assignments. Such a tendency can inhibit learning because it holds back students to explore experimentation.

However, when it comes to gamification, students assume that mistakes are bound to happen. Thus, failure becomes a smaller concern, and achieving goals by experimenting becomes a focus, hence making learning fun and relevant.

Freedom to Experiment

When students feel that they’re free to fail, they tend to heighten their freedom of experimentation to reach goals. Experimentation comes with the direct benefit of permitting self-directed learning, which enhances the quality and volume of learning. In the absence of explicit instructions, students tend to observe, learn, and focus more.

Freedom to experiment also increases students’ knowledge and creative thinking ability. Instead of limiting to operate within limits of facts, gamification allows students to explore new avenues to accomplish their set targets.

Freedom to Assume Different Identities

Gamification opens a new world for students. One of the key aspects of games is escapism, or the ability to experience a uniquely different life temporarily. As a central theme of learning, gamification can provide a huge scope as a powerful pedagogical tool, because when students assume new roles and see the world from a different perspective, they tend to dive into new areas of knowledge.

This freedom could prove quintessential to the basic education level where students can replicate skill-building into real-life learning.

Freedom of Effort

Most gamification techniques come with an internal rhythm where teams put in a collective effort for achieving targets and relaxing while other teams do the same. In gamification techniques where a single player is involved, the games are designed with moments of relative inactiveness. This takes the form of informational/ entertaining cut scenes, or while handing out the new target/ task to achieve.

Alternative durations of intense action, concentration, and relaxation doesn’t overtax students or exhaust them. Instead, it makes learning fun and relevant. On average, children of age 5 years can concentrate at a stretch for no longer than 10 minutes. The same is estimated at 20 minutes for teenagers. In a gamified environment, students’ concentration can be focused on pursuing a single task or completing assignments.

Automated Teaching

The greatest advantage of gamification in keeping learning fun and relevant is the automation of tasks, which otherwise is performed manually by educators or instructors. For instance, certain apps, such as TabRider and Duolingo are designed to provide instant feedback to students, which allows them to know if they’ve chosen the correct word or not. Such apps enable practicing with a virtual teacher. When the students perform in class with the actual teacher, they can devote more time to difficult issues that cannot be addressed using software or games.

Gamification: Pedagogical Innovation to incentivize students

Applying the techniques of gamification in education will incentivize learners in exploring learning independently and efficiently. This is due to the reason that gamification helps in building connections amongst academic community members because it encourages competition and collaboration.

Whether the educator is teaching in-person or remotely, gamification has a tremendous scope as a social dimension for teaching and learning. Further, gamified learning tends to immerse students in content, thus cultivating a positive mindset towards the learning process. This leads to learning becoming less laborious or boring, and more fun, relevant, and rewarding.

Gamification can be easily applied in a range of educational situations, which may range from casual to digitally sophisticated, informal to analog. Instructors or educators can create gamified learning activities according to diverse durations, complexities, and scales.

Conclusion

Despite the amplifying scope of gamification in learning and education, limited and unreliable empirical data regarding its effects on education is not enough. A pilot-scale scientific study is needed before affirming or drawing conclusions. However, the achievements of implementing gamification in education models are impressive, especially in Mathematics and English. Gamification can likely become successful when started at basic education level or at skill-building levels in universities. In a remote learning scenario, exploring alternative education styles can help educators before students’ interests drop.

Learning Management System or LMS is a cloud-based software program that assists in course information, content delivery, and facilitating learning modules. Modern-day LMSs date back to the early 2000s when Blackboard Inc. and CourseInfo first created Interactive Learning Network to be installed at Yale Medical School and Cornell University. Further in 2002, the open-source LMS revolution began with Moodle, which became one of the most popular LMS later. In this article, we’ll explain how education institutions can tap into the growing power of LMSs to enhance hybrid learning.

Rapid adoption of LMSs

Even though learning management systems for educational institutions have existed for over two decades, we have seen staggering global market growth in the last few years. In April 2020, the World Economic Forum released a report highlighting that over 1.2 billion students in more than 186 countries were impacted directly due to school closures amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic crisis further acted as a digital juggernaut for the education ecosystem which rapidly adopted and revolutionized the learning management system industry. As education goes into a full-blown digital ecosystem, the need for interactive, secured and customized learning tools will also increase, hence pushing the demand for LMSs further. In 2020 itself the market grew by 23.8% and is expected to grow at 19.1% Compound Annual Growth Rate reaching USD 37.9 billion in 2026.

Learning Management Systems: Why and What?

Since LMSs come with the capability of enabling educational institutes to widen their reach, LMSs’ functionality becomes increasingly adaptable. The high demand for LMSs is attributed to the rising need for accessible learning with the management of content. Recurring lockdowns have peaked the demand for interactive and smart learning platforms like open online courses, e-learning, online tutorials, and mobile education. Efforts to make content delivery more interactive and fun has also led to the reimagining of LMSs to make them more institute-specific as per the demand.

LMS platforms come with several benefits, which include growing productivity and efficiency for any institute. Let’s understand some points on the growing power of LMS for education institutions.

Single platform for course management

Educators usually find it hard to organize their teaching processes and contents on multiple platforms, such as Zoom, Google Meet, or Skype. It also hinders educators from selling courses online on different apps or platforms, creating forms or touch bases with each student. This not only decreases efficiency but also wastes time.

LMS platform can help in effective time management by scheduling classes in advance, without manual intervention. The teachers can now just organize lessons and upload for each student to log in and get access through one common platform. 

Automation led improved efficiency

Teacher-student interaction through the LMS platform ensures effective management. Students can take on the quizzes, tests, and exams, and submit their papers. Queries, concerns, or questions of students can be easily answered either through live chat, or emails facilitated directly through automation in LMS systems. Marking students’ assignments, automated certification, and connecting them to relevant reads help improve efficiency at many levels.

Personalization

Learning Management System helps individual educators or institutes in delivering personalized and custom services which cater to specific target audiences. Tailoring course material to suit each level of student both current and prospect with an individual teaching approach helps build a better brand for an educational platform as well.

Functionality, design, and features of LMS can deliver the desired content to the target market. Linguistic preferences are another key feature that LMS provides. Whether an institute chooses monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual choice is also possible with an LMS.

Easier collaboration and communication

LMS platforms facilitate easy collaboration and communication between students and teachers. It is an open channel where different options of communication like email, chats, forums, and chatbots are available to the students and teachers.

LMS is also an effective platform for building email campaigns or having audience data for planning webinars, seminars, and understanding users’ requirements.

Tracking user behavior becomes easier with LMS

LMS comes with an opportunity to track user behavior by integration of analytical tools. Number of monthly users, students’ attendance, number of courses or lessons taken, most visited pages, time spent on each page/ course/ lesson- data like this is trackable with ease through LMS.

Additionally, LMS also enables decision-makers like teachers or educators in creating individual goals for students, which must be accomplished for final results. Tracking students’ activities and goal completion can be achieved through the power of LMS.

Ease of data collection

LMS not only helps in effective and easier data collection but also assists in marking multiple recurring events like attendance without the hassle of the teacher taking that pain. Every student that registers on the platform provides an email address, name, and sometimes phone number. By adding mandatory fields of choice, an institute can get easily more information as and when needed. 

Conclusion

An LMS can be one of the most effective supporting tools for interactive learning sessions in remote education ecosystems with the increasing investment in the ed-tech market. In the USA itself, about 54% of the higher education institutes and 42% of the K-12 institutes are investing money in ed-tech.
The power of LMS is the assortment of opportunities. From organizing any number of lessons to being creative in features, LMS can help in managing, creating, publishing, and organizing as much content as required. They also enable an institute to reach out to a wider audience through a single platform.

CMS migration is one of the most critical steps for an organization. Therefore there goes a meticulous amount of hard time, effort and planning. Migration can be of various kinds including transferring data from HTTP to HTTPS, from subdomain to a subfolder, from an existing domain to a new one, and finally from the present content management system to a new one.  In this article, we will discuss five obstacles to complete CMS migration for the entire website, and how to overcome them.

Key obstacles and barriers -

Downtime concerns that may cost bounty

About 70% of the professionals across the world haven’t yet calculated how much it may cost for their site to remain down on an hourly basis. About one-third of the 2000 European IT professionals surveyed for the State of Resilience Report say that they experienced about six or more hours of downtime during CMS migration. That’s a lot, especially for  e-commerce or financial services businesses. Unplanned downtime can cost a company its reputation, and substantial direct loss in revenue.

Data handling

Data migration is a huge project with high risk . It forms a major barrier to CMS migration because 38% of the migration projects often result in failure. Apart from data migration, data quality concerns also remain at the heart of the migration project. Inconsistency, inaccuracy and data loss are some issues about data handling. We’ve categorized data handling obstacles in two parts- data migration obstacles and data quality barriers.

Barriers of Data Migration	Barriers of Data Quality
Lack of knowledge about source data	Redundant or obsolete content
Not estimating data analysis properly	No lifecycle considerations (migrating data that has already met its retention, or there aren’t reasons enough to continue with that data)
Absence of the integrated processes	Missing metadata
Lack of specification validation	Inconsistent metadata due to use of diverse data structures
Failure for implementation validation
Delay in evaluating final results
No collaboration
Improper use of expertise

 

Lack of planning

Most organizations go for frequent migration either after every 5 years, or on an ad hoc basis. This means that there’s a lack of migration schedule and predictability, which often results in failure. Due to lack of planning organizations suffer staff overtime or downtime, which may cost them bountiful.

Website migration to the new CMS may take about five business days, depending upon the size of the existing website. Survey done by the State of Resilience Report suggests that the CMS migration project takes an average of 9-24 hours of the staff time. However, about a quarter of the respondents also said that their site took 25-100 hours for CMS migration. Inability for CMS migration and starting applications on target CMS in stipulated time frame may stem from inept early testing, which results in cost overruns and IT hurdles.

SEO risks

CMS migration comes with SEO risks. The question here isn’t “if migration will hurt the SEO,” but “how much will it hurt.” Inefficient migrations may result in losing focus on key SEO metrics, such as bounce rate, Referral traffic source, average page loading time.

Some obstacles concerning SEO may be due to the following reasons-

• Not keeping the older URL structures
• Having different rules or templates for H1 Tags and Meta Tags
• New CMS having a different methodology for service files, which include robots.txt and XML sitemap
• Using plugins in existing CMS that do not work in target CMS 

Lack of technical know-how

Most organizations lack the required software tools to migrate to target CMS. This is among the most common migration failures or obstacles of successful moving. CMS migration isn’t a target-and-fire approach. It requires experienced technical know-how and calls for IT resilience, planning and testing at each stage, and better practices and processes adoption. Advanced technical skills help with key migration challenges such as-

• File format issues: including proprietary format, complex format, linked format, unknown format, and duplicate files.
• System dependency issues: including integrated systems, reports, process dependencies, and bandwidth issues.
• Data quality issues: as discussed in point #2
• Process issues: including accuracy, quality control, duration and timing, communication, and users.

How to overcome hurdles: Migration Checklist

About 83% of the organizations carrying out data migration end up either failing the migration project, or overrunning the costs, according to the Research Gate report. However, innovating and changing is an essential part of an organization's growth, which is why a migration checklist at different stages is a must. Overcoming CMS migration obstacles can be divided broadly into three categories with a migration checklist namely pre, post and during migration.

Pre-Migration

The checklist below helps organizations in preparing ahead of the migration to spot potential roadblocks and establishing activities that must be done.

• Building migration team and notifying employees
• Performing content audit, Creating content inventory and Defining content strategy
• Setting up data for proper mapping, Having thorough data assessment
• Defining realistic migration plan
• Assessing security
• Analysing target CMS system
• Data backup & old website crawling

During Migration

After an organization has done preparations for CMS migration, they can move to the core task of migration with the following checklist.

• Analysing data architecture on source and target CMS
• Set up your target CMS
• Create contingency plans and backups
• Carry out migration and transfer content to target CMS
• Pro-Tip: Always have a Plan B with all scenarios of ‘what-ifs’. This should ideally be done with a contingency plan for each step.

Post-Migration

After you’ve moved your content to the target CMS it’s still not the time to sit back and relax. Here’s the post-migration checklist that must be followed as a final blow to the nail so as to ensure fixation of the project.

• Testing for integrity and data accuracy
• System and data optimization
• Monitoring new CMS for content reformatting, fixing broken URLs, checking crawl errors, checking website speed (especially for SEO), and restructuring website elements
• Decommissioning old legacy CMS
• Train and educate personnel/ end user for new CMS

Conclusion

CMS migration is a challenging process that requires proper planning and a good execution strategy. The cost of CMS migration largely depends upon the website size, and the team members involved. Hiring a team of experts with proven technical expertise, and letting the company you’ve chosen for migration handle all your needs should be the way ahead.

The global cloud computing market in the education industry grew at more than 26% CAGR until  2021, said the Technavio market research. This translates to the estimated market value of   $25 billion in 2021, up from $8 billion in 2016. Cloud experts suggest reduced cost of ownership, ease in data analytics, and mobile friendly cloud platforms are key factors behind such a growth. In this article, we will look at these reasons in detail.

Cloud as transformation enabler

Recent Ecosystem AI study report listed top priorities for the education sector. Personalised learning, analytics based solutions like student profiling, needs assessment, curriculum gap analysis came as top priorities. Cloud based solutions help implement such top industry needs with enormous ease of implementation, providing secure, scalable and dependable solutions. Top vendors in cloud solutions for the ed-tech industry are Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco Systems, IBM, and Adobe Systems.

Enhanced Accessibility & Collaboration

With the advancement of technology in pedagogy, cloud enables enhanced accessibility to multiple stakeholders, whether they’re on-campus, or remote. Cloud enables better collaboration as well through a range of tools for virtual syncs even across mobile devices. Productivity suites like Microsoft Office 365, and Google’s G Suite, along with cloud migration through Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, are some of the best ways in which schools can enhance access.

Efficiency & Boosted Productivity

Tools like Google management console can be used for cloud device management. Such tools tend to boost efficiency and are quite popular among K-12 (primary and secondary education) models. Education institutions require tremendous administrative work by not just teachers, but the allied personnel as well. Cloud can easily help in streamlining workflows across different teams leading to increased productivity.

Scalability & Agility

Cloud computing offers applications’ ability to match any number of users. Various tools of cloud enable scalability especially during peak times such as admissions, assignment submissions, or training registrations at universities, colleges, and K-12 institutions. Cloud solutions provide the ability to quickly scale up and down with unparalleled agility.

Simplified information sharing

Since cloud computing leads to minimal hardware resources, therefore the applications tend to operate seamlessly across multiple devices among teachers, students and other stakeholders. Cloud also creates a centralized system that can manage faculty records or dense attendance, which leads to a simplified and integrated transformation.

Data Security

When education institutes choose vendors for cloud services, they also tend to reduce hassles around compliances and data security. The shared responsibility model (SRM) creates such a scenario which does not hold cloud consumers responsible for security controls entirely from the applicable framework that they use. Some of these controls are shared with the cloud service provider, thereby bringing down an institute’s responsibility for data security in entirety.

Cost Effectiveness

Reduced costs on infrastructure, on-premises hardware and equipment, complex wired phone systems, and institute’s recurrent and upfront expenditure- is all possible by use of cloud-based technologies and communication platforms. Cost effectiveness of using cloud roots from using everything that an institute has been paying for. Whether it’s single sign-on interoperability, applications or servers- putting everything in a comprehensive package can lead to decreased expenses and thorough cost effectiveness.

What next for cloud solutions in 2022?

Educational institutions that put in a chunk of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and CapEx in enabling digital transformation (DX) are going to desire the most churning of their resources   than ever before. Here are the top predictions for Ed-Tech with cloud solutions in 2022 and beyond:

• Hybrid or blended learning is here to stay  due to increased  availability of digital resources.  
• Models like community cloud deployment and hybrid cloud deployment will see considerable adoption rate in the education market.
• Education industry will see exponential growth in  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) based service models.

Conclusion

Cloud in education enables several benefits including effectiveness in knowledge delivery, and efficiency in business process management. Versatility, accessibility, scalability, agility, and cost-saving are some of the inherent benefits brought to the education industry by cloud. With remote learning gaining needed popularity, cloud computing seems to be a digital enabler in the transformation process for the education sector.

The statistics around cyber security are alarming. Around 30,000 websites are hacked globally on a daily basis. As many as 64% of the companies across the world have faced one or more kinds of cyber attack.

Given that Drupal core version 8 series reached end of life on November 2, 2021, does that mean that you’re really left in the midst of the ocean without an anchor to secure you? What happens to contributed projects after Drupal 8’s end of life? In this blog, we discuss such concerns that you may have.

What is Drupal 8 End of life?

Drupal core version 8 was released on November 19, 2015. It’s shelf life ended on November 2, 2021, which is also known as “Drupal 8 end of life”. This means that the Drupal official community will not provide security support for any of the earlier releases of Drupal 8 core or contributed project releases that are compatible with only Drupal 8. So, there will neither be any further Drupal 8 releases nor any updates to previous releases or security patches even to critical threats. The dedicated security team from the Drupal community shall not actively test or review the contributed modules for Drupal 8.

Why End of Life Now?

There are three-fold reasons why Drupal 8 end of life happened. Firstly, Drupal uses multiple third-party dependencies, such as Symfony, Twig, PHPUnit, and CKEditor 4, among other components. Drupal 8 uses Symfony 3, which reached its EOL in November 2021. Security support for CK Editor 4 also ended around the same time. So, Drupal cannot support backward compatibility, and had to move on with newer versions for Drupal 9, letting go of Drupal 8.

Secondly, the Drupal community wanted to introduce more features through Drupal 9, maintaining what Drupal is known for- its uniqueness. Forking Symfony 3 and maintaining it with Drupal could’ve been an option had Drupal wanted duplication of that effort. However, the Drupal community wanted more autonomy and innovation. Also, effort duplication does not come across as an ideal practice.

Thirdly, the Drupal 9 upgrade is not as significant an architectural change as Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. And that’s the reason why the Drupal 9 adoption has been fastest among any previous versions. It took only one month for 60000 Drupal sites to migrate to Drupal 9, compared to seven months for migration to Drupal 7. In such a situation, continuing with Drupal 8 doesn't sound logical for users as well.

Switch anchor to avoid sailing solo

Do you feel you are sailing solo post Drupal 8 end of life? Well, yes and no! The real answer to this is that while you still have time to upgrade to the higher version, i.e., Drupal 9, you’re not entirely sailing solo in the rough patch. It just means that the anchor, Drupal 8, which supported your ship is no longer there. So you may still be hanging in there, but if the high tide topples your ship, there isn’t a life boat that’s coming to save you.

In business terms, it means that your site may be open to malicious attacks without security support from Drupal. With the alarming rise in web attacks, migrating to Drupal 9 or Drupal 10 just ensures a permanent security net for you.

Whether you have earlier contributed projects in Drupal 8 or are using them for your site, knowing the compatibility status of the contributed modules helps you in many ways. You can check the same from the Drupal 9 deprecation dashboard. In fact, about 88% of the top 1000 contributed modules are also compatible with Drupal 9, which means that they have usability in both Drupal 8 and 9.

Moreover, 50% of all Drupal 8 contributed modules are also compatible with the newer Drupal version, while 20% of these only require upgrade of info.yml file or/and composer.json file for them to be Drupal 9 compatible.

If your contributed project such as module or theme is compatible with Drupal 7 or 9, and has already opted for the security coverage, you shall continue to receive security advisories. Drupal 7 end of life or shelf life is until November 2022, while Drupal 9 end of life will happen in November 2023.

Upgrade is more than just security fix

Migrating to Drupal 9 helps you get enticing features of this version. Features such as richer media management, accessibility of powerful visual designing, front end facilities, intuitive designs, and improvement in further migration, can help you or your clients reap several benefits in the long run.

With such innovative features of newer Drupal versions, and ease of upgrade from Drupal 8, migrating to these higher Drupal versions is more than just a security fix. Keeping future roadmap plans in mind as an immediate action step, a thorough compatibility assessment, and Drupal 9 readiness audit for your site and contributed projects should be done.

Valuebound, the leading digital transformation company, recently earned Great Place to Work® certification for the year 2021-22. Abhijit Upadhyay, Valuebound’s Chief Operating Officer, shares the journey to the most prestigious “employer-of-choice” recognition in this interview. 

Taking into perspective the 10-year long history of Valuebound, what do you have to say about Valuebound’s accreditation in 2021 as a Great Place to Work® (GPTW) -certified organization at this stage?

Abhijit: Perseverance and accepting the need for change helps any individual or an organization to transform. This 10-year-long journey has given us the opportunity to learn and improve upon employee experience. The grind of 10 years has enabled us in making key policy changes, the result of which is here for you to witness.

What according to you makes an organization a great place to work? And in the context of Valuebound, what do you think are Valuebound’s unique policies or ethics that earned it GPTW certification?

Abhijit: For me a great place to work must be able to give a sense of belongingness towards the organization, so that the employees feel self-motivated towards their professional goals, and company’s objectives, on the whole.
Pace of change speeds up, when the entire team is thoroughly driven towards a common goal. And, this can only happen when each one of us has a common gene in our DNA and that is of ownership.

If I talk about myself, I give one third of my valuable time of the day to the organization and to ensure my other two third of the time is happy. I need to take that happiness back to my home. This can only happen when my workplace is a fun place to work for every single employee.

What would be your message to a prospective employee of Valuebound?

Abhijit: Success of a journey depends upon how you start it and with whom. I am sure together as one team we will define each others’ journey paths and be a guiding light to each others’ career.

Between people and revenue, how do you balance? The pressure of revenue, hard decisions etc. impacts the environment. How do you manage this inherent dichotomy?

Abhijit: We are in a growth stage right now, so definitely revenue is an important fuel to propel growth. However, I also strongly believe that if we invest in people  right now and always. In the short term it may feel that our margins are impacted, but the long term benefits will outweigh any counter theory. It’s important to invest in people's engagement for the enduring success of an organization.

India is at a cusp of digital literacy and digital transformation. There's extensive support for the IT industry in the present scenario. Where do you see Valuebound in the light of this scenario?

Abhijit: Traditionally we have catered to the digital needs of big enterprises, three of which happen to be fortune 500 companies. However, in the last few years we have taken a conscious decision to collaborate with start-ups and help them in translating their ideas into products and solutions. Start-up space in India is warming up and we see a great opportunity for us to play the technology partners to the young and upcoming entrepreneurs or help them improve and scale up the process. We are working with few unicorns and have enabled delivery at a faster pace. Enterprises are shifting away from traditional concepts of technology delivery. They are open to work with organisations of our scale and have been continuously giving us opportunities to deliver the goods. 

Office culture and working scenario have changed a lot after COVID. What do you think is the role of an organization to smoothen people’s journey into this new mindset while also coping with the pressure of changed working dynamics?

Abhijit: As an Organization we focus on our employee’s mental and physical wellness. Our policies and programs have consistently focused on ensuring there are no red lines crossed when it comes to having a good work-life balance. I would like to thank our employees for the agility they have shown in recalibrating their working ways due to the pandemic. There has not been any significant impact on economic dynamics. I also want to extend my gratitude to all our clients for being accommodative in these testing times.

If you were to change three things about Valuebound for the better at this stage, what would they be?

Abhijit: As stated earlier, we are in the transformation phase where we are bringing in changes. This paradigm shift is happening at all three transformation levers, namely people, process, and tools.

GPTW certification is seen as a gold standard for any organization. Now since Valuebound has been recognized as one of them, what’s next in store after GPTW certification? What are your next steps  to make Valuebound even better?

Abhijit: GPTW certification comes with the responsibility of maintaining the momentum and improving ourselves. Workplace becomes great only when we continuously work towards improving the employee engagement and experience. We are growing at a rapid pace and to extend the same experience, to wow our employees at a bigger scale is something that I am looking forward to.

In the end I would like to summarize by extending my warm gratitude to our employees, leadership team, and most importantly clients for being a part of wonderful 2021. Looking forward to 2022. Happy New Year and Happy Holidays to you all, from all of us at Valuebound.