Information Technology

During 2021 the College was again required to spend long periods of time delivering distance learning as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although having students and staff working from home had its challenges, the experience gained and the Information Communication Technology (ICT) system development made during 2020 continued to serve the College well.

The College again offered loan devices for any students who required them to support their learning. Devices were offered to Senior School students from the start of the year and many parents took advantage of this offer. In the Junior School, devices were prepared and set aside in case they were needed in the future. When the first lockdown for the year occurred, the Junior School was able to immediately transition to distance learning by sending students home with a loan device. Wyse is the College’s Intranet, communication platform and learning management system (LMS). Long periods of distance learning has resulted in an accelerated uptake of Wyse by students and staff and the adoption of many administrative features in Wyse. The Wyse parent and future parent interfaces received an update and designs have been created to improve the Wyse student and staff interfaces in the near future.

During 2021 the threat of cybercrime continued to rise across Australian independent schools with several schools reporting they had been targeted and had suffered significant disruption. The College continues to work with security experts to harden our security and adopt practices to mitigate our risk as much as possible. Given the changing nature of this threat this work is ongoing.

A significant project during 2021 has been updating many important ICT governance documents such as our Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP). Our updated DRP has prepared the College to deal with ICT disasters so that the College can recover from an outage with minimal disruption.

An ongoing project to reduce the use of paper in our administration and to adopt digital storage and communication solutions continued in 2021. All current student records were digitised as well as a significant number of past student records. Throughout the College paper forms are gradually being converted to electronic forms (eforms). The eforms have a digital workflow which enforces the College’s policies and business rules while integrating with our systems to remove manual handling. Electronic forms have allowed the College to quickly create digital solutions when required. One example was the requirement for the College to quickly obtain student COVID-19 vaccination status to allow students to attend off-site education programs.

Brenton Harty Director of ICT and Privacy Officer