University IT: What's the impact of poor performance on final grades?

Does poor IT performance really impact a student’s final grade? Interesting question; of course there are many variables, but the bottom line is, in one way or another, it can do.

It’s important to consider that given how reliant higher education is on IT these days to underpin learning and research, there are many ways that unreliable or poorly performing IT can impact this process and influence the end result for students either directly or by impeding university staff and by extension the students.

For example, the impact that poor IT performance has on productivity due to an inability to access a certain system, can inhibit teaching staff with the delivery of their lessons. Even recurring ‘technical troubles’ can pose significant interruptions and delays for students and staff alike.

We’ll explore this in more depth below based on problems we’ve seen ourselves and helped universities overcome, but also feedback from industry leaders and first-hand research from higher education IT users - the students.

Quickly, lets look at what's covered on this page:

Common IT performance challenges that impact students learning

-Student productivity syndrome

-If your teams putting out fires, they aren't driving strategy

-Complaining without explaining

-Lack of specialists

What can be done to tackle these challenges

-Monitor digital experience 

-Monitor application performance

-Review how the network is managed

How can these challenges be tackled?

We’ve just pointed out some specific challenges that IT teams in higher education face but you probably already know this, so we want to be a bit more helpful that that, so here are some suggestions to help alleviate these challenges and put the power back in the hands of the IT teams.

Digital experience monitoring (DEM)

End user experience monitoring or EUX has many names but essentially, it’s the monitoring of how IT is delivered and consumed across your user base, be that staff or student and all the systems inbetween.

What is it?

Monitoring of key metrics throughout your network from data centre to users, to the Cloud.

Why is it required?

Firstly, it gives visibility into connections and transaction times across your estate, giving insight into their performance, highlighting any issues and processes that are causing problems. It also gives this visibility in areas outside of your control e.g. Wi-Fi issues in students' homes. This speeds up root-cause analysis by giving a clear objective direction to investigation and improving understanding of the full impact of the problem.

Secondly, it provides a baseline of where your IT ‘normally’ performs. This is useful for continuous proactive improvement, allowing IT teams to tackle their problem areas and consistently improve service levels for staff and students, as well as highlighting any low-hanging fruit for quick gains.

Baselining also provides a great before and after to monitor the impact of change, giving IT teams and leadership the data to see the impact and demonstrate ROI.

Application performance monitoring (APM)

This is the practice of tracking key software application performance metrics using monitoring software and telemetry data.

What is it?

APM tools/services can provide an overview of server interactions and can drill deep into the application specifics (web page elements, database calls, Java method performance etc.) to help pinpoint what is impacting application performance. 

Why is it required?

Whilst DEM can point you in the right direction when it comes to troubleshooting, it doesn’t give you the granular details that APM provides. When you’re having difficulty understanding the performance of a specific application then you need to get deep inside the tin in order to get the level of insight needed to achieve actual root-cause analysis.

APM provides the data to make decisions based on knowledge, not ‘best guess’. The amount of budget that is spent based on incomplete information is quite frightening. These decisions are best guesses and are often made to treat symptoms, not solve root-causes, leaving them ineffective and, frankly, a drain on funds.

Review how the network is managed

It’s likely that through organic growth, your methods of network management are being stretched - software-defined solutions could hold the answer.

What are software-defined solutions?

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an approach to networking that uses software-based controllers or application programming interfaces (APIs) to communicate with underlying hardware infrastructure and direct traffic on a network.

Why are they required?

Modern networks weren’t built for the modern, cloud first, SaaS, frequent rapid-change, distributed era. For a long time, traditional WAN architecture has been complex and static, relying on manual intervention for configuration and not designed for Cloud operation.

A rapid increase in remote working and mobile application usage compounds the pressure, not only growing the size of the problem but also the number of connections to secure.

Complexity = congestion = latency, with a side helping of the complete unknown.

Software-defined network management solutions are a great option for higher education networks that need to manage not only connections from campus to campus but also a lot of remote connectivity.

Some benefits of SDN solutions include:

• Built-in optimisation
• Resilience with different carrier options
• A lot more insight into traffic

The two main solutions in the SDN space are SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), depending on the requirements of your specific University each solution may be more suitable.

SD-WAN:

combines software-defined networking concepts with traditional WAN technology to improve traffic routing and network operations.

SD-WAN develops and acts as an overlay network - a network that is built on top of another network, gets support from that network's infrastructure and separates services from the underlying infrastructure.  

SD-WAN's overlay is built on top of an organisation's existing WAN connections to improve how data travels across the network.

SASE:

Secure Access Service Edge is an emerging architecture that provides an organisation's traditional network and security functionalities, but through a Cloud service that connects endpoints from anywhere. Rather than creating a centralised mass-VPN connection point at your datacentre before relaying traffic back out, SASE connects an endpoint straight to your dedicated "cloud domain" where traffic can be firewalled/inspected and sent directly to SAAS or on-prem apps much more efficiently.

By uniting an organisation's necessary network and security services -- firewall as a service, secure web gateways, etc. -- into one platform, SASE aims to simplify network and security management.

To conclude, let’s go full loop, when it comes to final grades, where does the onus lie?

Of course, a student cannot directly blame university IT for getting a poor final grade, if there is an issue, it can be reported, other methods of carrying out their study can be found and they can allocate more time where needed to their studies to ensure they complete their work to the best of their ability.

But is that where the question comes in here? ‘To the best of their ability'.

If their ability to learn is reliant on a high-performing, reliable IT network, but it is impeded by the points stated above, where does the blame lie?

If the onus is on the student to achieve the best grades possible, with the resources available to them, then surely the onus is on university IT teams to ensure that they have those resources, tools, and teaching ready and available when it is required.