It may still be the case that an educator’s main goal is to provide an education. But as competition between institutions has increased, and students’ expectations have risen with them, many educators find themselves required to provide much, much more than just face time with a teacher.

This change has stimulated significant spending in student information systems and related technologies, many of which resemble customer relationship management tools and other business software systems.

Estimates for the global student information system market in 2024 generally sit at about US$10 billion ($15.3 billion), with Global Market Insights topping the range at US$11.9 billion ($18.3 billion). That figure is set to rise significantly however over the next decade, to reach US$41.4 billion ($63.5 billion), due in part to demand for AI and analytics capabilities to better track learner achievements and provide a more personalised experience.

A customer experience paradigm

One of the most fundamental shifts in student experience has been the changing language used to describe it, as education providers increasingly view learners as customers.

“There's a recognition for us that students are our main customer,” said Sandra Sharpham, executive director for student experience at Charles Sturt University (CSU).

“It's something that you wouldn't have heard a decade ago. It is a choice that people make to come to our university, and that's a customer behaviour.”

CSU is currently implementing a student management system from TechnologyOne, as part of its redeveloped digital experience platform. Its journey commenced more than a year ago with the creation of a set of 10 student experience principles designed to ensure students remained at the centre of its thinking as its technology refresh program developed.

The two leading principles are acting with empathy and being easy to do business with.

“The empathy piece reminds us and guides us to analyse behaviour and data from our students so that we can put them at the centre,” Sharpham said.

“That data tells us that students are here for a holistic journey, but they want their administrative tasks taken out of their faces. So that's the ‘easy to do business with’ idea, where we can take away that administrative burden and focus on those moments that matter for a student.”

As part of this process, Sharpham said CSU wanted to reduce its application and systems ecosystem, which would further streamline engagement for students. This investment was essential in a world where students were already technology-savvy.

“They're using them for handing in their assessments at school, and we also have a lot of mature age students whose expectations are coming from their everyday lives - in their banking and their own work," Sharpham said.

"People bring expectations with them, and their expectation for this to be easy is definitely growing."

Modernisation imperative

Improved student experiences are also driving the implementation of a new student management system at Monash University. That project, which was first announced in 2023, will see the cloud-based Ellucian Banner student information system progressively rolled out over the next two years.

According to chief transformation officer Josh Teichman, this project was the latest major development in a program of digital capability building that commenced in the late 2010s.

“We've been modernising our legacy platforms and capabilities and now we've reached a point where we can tackle the core systems,” Teichman said.

When completed, the project will further enhance previous work in the university’s digital landscape and CRM capability with Salesforce, which is used extensively across the student lifecycle, as well as its mobile app and student portal.

“Whether you're on the app or on the portal, or whether it's about your enrolment or your fees, or you’re engaging with studies or with your academics, the vision is that that should just be a seamless experience,” Teichman said.

“If we want to be able to deliver a modern experience for students and colleagues across the institution, we need to be deliberate about the capabilities and layer them up progressively from end to end.”

Artificial expectations

With generative AI now a key component of many business strategies, it is not surprising to see that education institutions are also exploring its potential to improve student experience. This is especially true in South Australia, which three years ago emerged as one of the most progressive education jurisdictions globally for its embrace of generative AI.

According to the chief information officer for the Department of Education, South Australia, Daniel Hughes, the goal at that time was to rapidly understand what the pitfalls would be in an educational context, but also what the benefits could be.

This perspective was built on an existing program of work to strengthen the foundational elements that underpinned the education system across 950 sites, so as to explore the emerging applications that could be run on top of it.

“We'd noticed that we were not really set up for success in those foundational elements and things weren't in place to enable greater immersion in digital tools for teaching and learning, and we saw some equity gaps in terms of the things that were available for students,” Hughes said.

Significant time was spent between 2018 and 2022 in building and extending the digital foundations such as internet, Wi-Fi, and other networking capability to ensure sites were set up for success. This foundation work meant that when ChatGPT first emerged in November 2022, the Department’s system was well placed to explore the use of emerging technologies and platforms.

“We chose not to ban access to generative AI tools and instead adopted a ‘learning together’ posture with our educators to explore the possibilities these tools might provide,” Hughes said.

“We created our own chat GPT alternative called ‘EdChat’, which we built in partnership with Microsoft, to get our heads around how we could safeguard students and educators as they used these types of tools.”

Having its own AI tool meant the department could control and contextualise the responses AI provided and learn together with the system.

In 2023 EdChat was deployed as part of an initial pilot to eight schools. A further rollout of EdChat to the Department’s 40,000 staff followed along with approximately 10,000 students across 16 schools.

“We set about a process with our educators to explore what you could do with this in your specific context,” Hughes said.

“What does it look like for a school in the middle of the desert in the far northwest of our state, all the way through to a big international high school here in metro Adelaide, and all the variants in between.”

Through that time the Department has monitored how use of the tool has evolved. What started with prompts from students asking EdChat to do their work for them has evolved to teachers mentoring and coaching students to create more sophisticated outcomes, such as asking EdChat to provide a more contextual perspective.

“So rather than ‘write me an essay on Napoleon Bonaparte’, the prompt will be something like ‘put me in the shoes of Napoleon Bonaparte, tell me what life was like,” Hughes said.

“That whole journey is now much richer in terms of the educational benefit as compared to the original way students were using it.”

Hughes said this highlighted the need for educators to coach and mentor students through their use as compared to blocking use entirely.

By developing its own system, rather than taking an off the shelf tool, Hughes said SA ensured it was servicing the specific context of its community in a safe and more meaningful way.

“The technology part was probably the easiest,” Hughes said.

“It was definitely about the adoption and the awareness but also asking the question of why this would be something that we'd want to do.

“We deliberately looked at this not being a technology implementation, but what this could look like in terms of positive changes it could bring to teaching practice, and what it could do to then personalise and differentiate learning for students.” 

Offering true support

While technology can play a critical role in enhancing student experience, it is important to remember that technology’s role is to serve the needs of students, and not the other way around.

At Mackillop Catholic Regional College in western Melbourne, ICT manager Nick Charlton said the approach to integrating technology into teaching and learning always began by asking what value it would add – ensuring any solution was both impactful and consistent.

The emphasis on ensuring that technology truly served the needs of education and provided an optimal experience was reflected in a decision Charlton took to accelerate Mackillop’s annual distribution of 600 laptops from six weeks to just an hour.

“The rule was I wanted to get a device into the student's hand as quickly as I possibly could, and that's because that gets them the best outcome,” Charlton said.

“So the first day students arrive at school, they get their device.”

With limited skills available within his team, and a seemingly endless list of requirements, Charlton makes use of third-party providers including Logicalis to take on tasks such as its Teams telephony rollout.

“I'm not in the business of making my life easier – if something makes the lives of teachers easier or delivers better outcomes to the students then that's what we'll deliver,” Charlton said.