How To Empower Education IT Teams with User Performance Monitoring

In the rapidly evolving education sector, ensuring a seamless and productive user experience is vital for students, teachers, and staff. With the rise of hybrid learning models and remote connectivity, educational institutions face the challenge of maintaining optimal performance and connectivity for users accessing resources from various locations. Identifying and resolving issues is crucial to upholding educational quality and delivering exceptional learning experiences when problems arise.

The education sector faces unique challenges in monitoring user performance within a hybrid learning environment. How can this be solved? A cutting-edge monitoring solution, empowering educational institutions to proactively detect and resolve performance issues, ensuring uninterrupted learning and collaboration.

IT teams in education face unique challenges in hybrid learning: diverse user tech proficiency, managing connectivity issues, and ensuring compatibility across devices. They must balance resource allocation, security, scalability, and user support while maintaining compliance and data privacy. We explore each challenge below.

8 Challenges for IT Teams in Education

1. Diverse User Tech Proficiency

Students and educators have differing levels of tech proficiency, making it challenging to create a standardized tech environment. IT teams must provide training and support to bridge the proficiency gap, ensuring everyone can effectively use the technology.

2. Managing Connectivity Issues Across Environments

In a hybrid learning setup, students and faculty work from various locations, each with different internet connectivity quality and reliability. IT teams must explore diverse solutions such as mobile hotspots, VPNs, or bandwidth management to mitigate connectivity issues.

3. Ensuring Compatibility Across Devices

Schools often use various devices, including laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Ensuring software and content compatibility across these platforms is a significant challenge. To solve this, IT teams must invest in or develop cross-platform applications and content to facilitate seamless learning.

4. Resource Allocation

Education institutions typically have limited IT budgets. IT teams must carefully allocate resources to address the most pressing needs and invest wisely in technology. Choosing the proper hardware and software solutions that balance cost, functionality, and scalability is crucial.

5. Security and Compliance

IT teams must safeguard sensitive student and faculty data, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations like the US Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the EU General Data Protection Regulation. With the rise in cyber threats, implementing robust cybersecurity measures is essential to protect educational assets and personal data.

6. Scalability

As users and digital resources grow, IT teams must scale their infrastructure without causing disruptions. Many institutions adopt cloud-based solutions to ensure easy scalability and flexibility.

7. User Support

Providing practical and accessible helpdesk support is crucial for troubleshooting issues and ensuring a smooth learning experience. Encouraging feedback from students and faculty helps IT teams identify pain points and improve.

8. Data Privacy

Students and faculty should have control over their data, including consenting to data usage. Maintaining transparency about data practices and policies is essential to build trust in the educational technology ecosystem.

Mitel Education Customer Spotlight: UMass Boston

UMass Boston faced a recurring issue with their MiVoice MX-ONE system, resulting in a weekly alarm and a 10-minute disruption in call billing. This loss of revenue highlighted the lack of visibility into their system's performance and network events, a common challenge faced by IT and telecom teams in universities and other organizations. To tackle this problem, UMass Boston's PBX Telecommunications Engineer, Larry McKeon, recognized the need for a solution like Mitel Performance Analytics (MPA).

UMass Boston acquired the advanced service tier, MPA Plus, leveraging its existing Mitel Premium Software Assurance. Implementing MPA Plus allowed the university to monitor the performance of its MiVoice MX-ONE and MiContact Center systems effectively. Through email alerts and deep visibility provided by MPA Plus, UMass Boston identified the root cause of the weekly outage: a port-security scan interfering with the MX-ONE's calls.

MPA Plus empowered UMass Boston to proactively address voice quality issues and gain a comprehensive understanding of its unified communications network. The software provided valuable insights into call quality for every user, facilitating faster troubleshooting and ensuring successful operations for over 5,000 users. With MPA Plus, UMass Boston transformed from a reactive to a proactive approach, resolving problems before users were even aware of them.

UMass Boston also benefited from the email alerts and the IP Telephony dashboard, enabling the IT team to be notified promptly and troubleshoot reported problems efficiently. The trunk utilization reporting in MPA Plus simplified capacity planning, ensuring effective resource allocation to meet user demands.

UMass Boston's successful implementation of MPA Plus exemplifies the significance of user performance monitoring in the education industry. Organizations can proactively address issues, prevent revenue losses, and deliver a superior user experience by leveraging monitoring tools like MPA.

Stay ahead of the curve by prioritizing user performance monitoring in your organization and unlock the full potential of collaboration tools. Discover how MPA can empower financial services to proactively address performance issues, prevent revenue losses, and deliver exceptional user experiences.

Book a demo today to unlock your collaboration tools' full potential and stay ahead in the fast-paced financial services industry.