Education.NSW Digital Connected Network

PRIMARY DESIGN CHALLENGE Education.NSW Digital Connected Network solves a key design challenge of how do we make it simple for schools to manage and publish web content that is customised to the audience, helping people find critical information faster, and on the device of their choice anywhere, anytime. This includes surfacing role-based content specific to the user. For example, lesson plans to teachers, learning materials to students and child support materials to parents and carers. SECONDARY DESIGN CHALLENGE How do we syndicate global content across thousands of school websites that enables local content while pushing department-wide messaging.

Built out across ADOBE's AEM and Facebook Business Manager, the platform functions as a hub and spoke model that allows syndicated content to be deployed across the 2,200 school websites, social media pages and mobile app notifications. The platform centralises website management and consolidates assets, while giving schools control over local content and the look and feel of their sites through ready-to-use templates and components. The ecosystem provides access to over 1.7m users per month, along with 1.4m Facebook followers. Since the beginning of the project, the department has created 1.5 million digital assets and published 1.6 million web pages.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and floods crisis, the platform enabled simultaneous broadcasts to thousands of school websites within minutes. This supported 1.2 million parents and carers and 110,000 staff by delivering immediate notifications on school closures via the website and mobile app. The unified network of sites supported a 100 percent increase in website traffic in the last four years and has more than 2 million monthly users. The platform strengthened the connection between the department and communities by enabling consistent, coordinated and large-scale communications to be sent to students, teachers, parents and carers that also supported "learning from home".

- An Education.NSW design system called the Global Experience Language uses patterns that have accessibility as a cornerstone of their development and provide a consistent user experience across thousands of digital properties. - “Education Live” which uses the video streaming technology Brightcove to live stream to more than 500,000 students in a single session. - Centralised and decentralised publishing to localise content to individual schools while enabling central news feeds from the department. - A robust, well-designed, secure digital platform that is available 24/7. - A primary website (https://education.nsw.gov.au/) with 2,200 connected school websites. - Integration with a Parent App enabling parents and carers to aggregate news and events from multiple schools to a single location. - Support of campaigns through easy-to-use publishing and management of campaign websites. For example, https://education.nsw.gov.au/campaigns/mathematics/everyday-maths - Delivery of alerts and notifications. - Support of virtual learning environments.