De La Salle is an independent Catholic College following the Lasallian faith principles to value, respect and welcome all. The ethos of De La Salle is to provide equal educational opportunities to all students, irrespective of their social or financial background. Students are promised an optimal learning environment, where each can achieve personal excellence, distinguishing De La Salle from other colleges.
Bridging the Digital Divide for De La Salle Students
About the Client
Overview
De La Salle’s strategy is to have the curriculum available digitally through a learning management system to ensure continuous and interactive learning experiences.
To support their strategy, the school opted for a “Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)” policy.
However, that policy created challenges that led to a digital divide. To resolve the issue, De La Salle established a new policy requiring every one of the 900 students to be provided with identical laptops, enabling students to thrive based on academic achievements rather than being held back by their access to reliable technology
Fast Facts
- Curriculum available through a learning management system
- Digital divide in education and learning
- 900 students issued identical, reliable laptops to access educational resources
- Extensive managed IT services program
- Laptop repair turnaround times
Problem
The BYOD policy resulted in students working with laptops of various brands, ages, specifications, and accessibility based on what was affordable to their families. The digital and technological divide meant that some students were at a disadvantage to others.
Students equipped with outdated devices could not participate equally in the education and learning process. These challenges jeopardised the institution’s mission of equal education for all.
Consequently, De La Salle was looking for an IT partner with high levels of agility, trustworthiness, and the ability to provide reliable laptops with robust support.
“Atturra has been the best company that I’ve worked with in the education sector. It has been the smoothest and the most reliable year in my time in education, having the HP notebooks with the Atturra support, experience, and expertise. “
Alex Zolkover,
IT Manager at De La Salle College
Solution
Atturra has many years of experience in managed IT laptop programmes and partners with HP, which is supporting the education market with state-of-the-art devices. Through this partnership, Atturra equipped De La Salle College with enterprise-grade laptops that were uniformly configured to the institution’s policies and guidelines to provide all students with the same level of education.
Besides the initial onboarding of the laptops, Atturra provide technical support to ensure high availability and the lowest possible mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). Support is delivered onsite by dedicated technicians to ensure that most problems are resolved within the same day. Atturra aims to ensure smooth educational workflows for all students and educators by making technology invisible yet indispensable to learning.
To achieve this goal, Atturra has invested heavily in creating appropriate spare parts holdings in partnership with HP. Partnering with HP is foundational in delivering high-quality laptops to all students and maintaining a quick turnaround time when things malfunction. The experience, and dedication to excellence of the Atturra team, has enabled De La Salle to close the digital divide and create equal opportunities for all students to thrive throughout their education.
Outcomes achieved
The technology implementation was a success and the effects within the De La Salle College were realised immediately.
The implementation of the managed laptop service resulted in:
- Smooth onboarding of all laptops to 900 students. Every laptop was up and running within a week, configured according to De La Salle’s policies.
- Higher approval ratings for user experience from all students.
- The positive reception from all educators who can support their students more effectively because everyone uses the same laptop with the same settings. Technology has become a facilitator of the learning process.
- Improved student engagement with the school curriculum. Students are more motivated to discover new knowledge because they can interact with the content more effectively and collaborate with their classmates on school projects.
- Improved cost-effectiveness for De La Salle College. Atturra handles all licensing and support issues and can provide a custom platform to order the laptops and log helpdesk support tickets if needed.
Technologies
- HP Hardware
