Implementing BYOD with a 802.11ac Wi-Fi network

Nudgee College in Brisbane recently made a massive change to its academic IT system, replacing ageing infrastructure such as servers and a fleet of college-owned notebooks.

The college is a day and boarding school for boys located in Boondall, one of Brisbane’s northern suburbs. With around 1500 students, it is one of the largest schools in Brisbane.

Whereas many schools have followed the strategy of providing a fleet of identical computers to all students (at least across each year level), Nudgee College had already taken a different tack by selecting a mix of hardware to address the varied needs of different subject areas. As the college was already used to operating a heterogeneous IT environment, a free-choice BYOD policy was not a daunting prospect.

The foundation of the project was the design and deployment of a Wi-Fi network that could support the large number of devices that was envisaged. Once the college was satisfied that was possible, it was able to explore other options.

A breakthrough occurred when they heard about Hapara which “makes Google Apps viable for education”, according to IT director Sean O’Brien. Among the functions provided by Hapara is the ability to quickly and easily establish email groups for each class, along with storage folders for each of a student’s classes and sharing them with the relevant teachers. Teachers can also reset students’ passwords.

Google Apps is free to schools, and Hapara only costs a few dollars per user per year, O’Brien said. The college also uses the Spanning Backup for Google Apps service that backs up Google Apps documents twice daily and offers educational users “an over 60% discount” on the base fee of US$40 per user per year.

While other solutions were considered, the Google Apps strategy was simpler and more affordable, said Alan Kepper, managing director of Laminar Communications, the College’s IT partner.

Installing the system

In mid-2013 the general approach was piloted in two classes - one in the humanities, the other in mathematics - that represented both ends of the education spectrum. The less-engaged students responded very well and immediately showed greater engagement, O’Brien said. Largely because they were more accountable, teachers were able to see how much work was or was not being done at home or during classes taken by substitute teachers. “It’s an enabler for changing conversations between students, parents and teachers,” he said.

By term four, the technical issues were largely settled, so information and training sessions for teachers were run at the end of the academic year so they could prepare for the new IT environment over the summer break.

While the college was closed for the summer, the new network was installed. Laminar Communications was engaged to design and commission the network, including the authentication and security aspects, largely on the basis of its track record of network installations at most of the schools in the region as well as the Queensland Parliament, the Brisbane Convention Centre, and Parliament House in Canberra.

Jacking up the school

The installation “was like jacking up the school, replacing the infrastructure, and lowering it again so nobody noticed”, said Kepper. Laminar installed Xirrus Wi-Fi equipment designed for high-density, large-scale wireless networks, along with HP products for the Ethernet backbone network.

It was obvious that a better internet connection would be required to support the use of software as a service (SaaS) and a fibre connection was arranged through the University of Queensland’s UQconnect operation.

Filtering and unified threat management was undertaken by a Fortinet device. “It’s a fairly popular product among schools in this region,” Kepper said. “It’s doing a superior security job for us.” The device also allowed O’Brien to prioritise Google Apps traffic, thus ensuring the performance of the cloud apps is unaffected by general web browsing or other traffic.

While completely inappropriate material is blocked, the college’s general strategy is to shape certain types of traffic and content. Therefore, games are severely restricted except between 3.00 and 7.00 pm. Students are allowed to use social media largely because parents living overseas wanted their sons to be able to stay in touch with their extended families.

The wireless network was designed to accommodate three devices per person. While the current average is less than that (currently 1500 users and 2500 devices are typically connected at any given time), O’Brien suspects it won’t be long before most students take at least three connected devices.

BYOD platform a reality

Allowing an almost completely free choice of devices (the only requirement is that a student’s primary device has a 7″ or larger screen) means the college is providing “the cheapest system possible for parents”, said dean of learning and teaching David Johnston, who added that a $300 Chromebook does as good a job as a $3000 notebook in their environment.

“This is BYOD 2.0,” said Kepper. “Nudgee College has a high-speed, segmented 802.11ac network, and it and Google Apps work with any device a student brings to school from an iPod touch to a notebook PC. Almost all information is delivered electronically and widely used. The college rolled out the project in eight weeks, not the two years most organisations would take. This should be seen as a huge success for an organisation with around 2500 users,” Kepper said.

In this context, the main advantages of the recently introduced 802.11ac standard are that it provides more bandwidth and therefore handles a denser device population. While maximum benefit is obtained when all of the devices support 802.11ac, older 802.11g and 802.11n devices are supported by the Xirrus hardware installed by Laminar.

BYOD in action

“There were far fewer problems than we anticipated,” said O’Brien. “My team expected to be under the pump on the first day of term one, but during the first hour 1000 students connected to the network without requiring any assistance.”

Workshops were run every morning for students and every afternoon for staff to address individual issues with the network or the software. “By the fourth week of term, student attendance had dropped right off and the problems being raised were generally unrelated to school systems,” said O’Brien.

It was much the same for staff. Teachers do not have to be experts on all aspects of the technology, as they are supported by the college’s IT staff, and students generally have a good knowledge of the devices they choose to use, so they are largely self-reliant.

An important feature of the new environment is that the Hapara software provides teachers with a real-time view of students’ Google Apps activity and therefore more insight into what their students are really doing.

And when planning classroom activities, teachers take advantage of Google Apps’ ability to allow up to 50 users to work on one document simultaneously. Being able to easily display any student’s document on the electronic whiteboard is another benefit.

The BYOD approach has been welcomed by parents, who appreciate the way the college has made things as affordable as possible. Devices costing just a few hundred dollars provide the required functionality.

The original budget was $800,000, but the actual expenditure will be less than $350,000. “This is largely thanks to Laminar’s expertise, including the advice to do a full wireless survey rather than extrapolating from a limited survey. That led to significant savings on the Wi-Fi network,” said O’Brien.

The college previously spent around $70,000 per year on student diaries, but these are no longer needed since each student’s Google Apps calendar is automatically populated with events, including assigned homework. Calendars are shared with parents, so they can easily keep track of what their sons are - or should be - up to!

“It would be encouraging to see other schools following suit,” said O’Brien. “BYOD and Google Apps are definitely working for us. But the network infrastructure is key, because if you don’t get that right you will have problems regardless of how good the other components are."