Department of Education – New South Wales - Australia

Project Background:

In March 2007, the Department of Education was awarded over $150 million to provide children regardless of their location access to standard levels of teaching and even specialized teaching programs. With over 4000 classrooms and some of the classrooms consisting of only 1 or 2 students in very remote locations, the focus of this project was to create technology centers in order to share limited and/or specialized teaching resources not physically available at each location. This project became known as the “Connected Classroom”.

C2C’s Role and Work with New South Wales Department of Education (NSW DET) and the Connected Classroom Project:

Initially, C2C was hired to define the technology required to support Connected Classroom. In order to meet this requirement, C2C worked with NSW DET to first assess the needs of the end users (students, staff and administration). Through this process, C2C was able to further define the objectives and then clearly align the UC technology to the end user. Once the definition and objectives were defined, then the technology for each Connected Classroom and the infrastructure required to support the network for the Connected Classrooms was determined.

The Consultancy Outcomes:

The strategy document developed provided a starting point for NSW DET. The document detailed the technology required in each classroom or location based on different types of distant learning scenarios. The document also outlined the infrastructure requirements based on an initial deployment of 200 Connected Classrooms in the first year to 4000 in the fourth year.

This document was then used as the basis for RFP process for NSW DET and assisted the IT organization in determining the requirements for each technology element in the Connected Classroom and its infrastructure.