Educational Portal for the Canton of Jura: Empowering Digital Education

 

 

Background and Context

Every public and private organization is challenged in its day-to-day work in an increasingly connected world. Each of them faces challenges of varying magnitude that can have a real impact on the way their organization operates.

The public sector and educational establishments are no exception, as they evolve within this rapidly expanding digital environment. These institutions must adapt their methods and tools to meet new educational demands.

The Department of Public Education in the canton of Jura (referred to as “EDU Jura” in this case study), oversees approximately 40 schools with around 1,000 teachers and approximately 8’400 students. EDU Jura embarked on a digital transformation process to modernize its teaching methods and enhance collaboration among: students/teachers and between teachers.

Our expertise in Microsoft solutions perfectly aligned with their needs and challenges, marking the beginning of our collaboration.

 

Primary Challenges

Until now, this IT department faced 2 major issues:

• Managing numerous facilities at the request of the school principals creates a significant workload and confusion.
• Lacking modern communication and teaching methods between school and students.

Mr. Jeanbourquin, Head of Digital School Education for the Canton of Jura, outlined their request: “We would like to delegate the management of rooms, equipment, courses, and classes to the canton’s primary and secondary schools while limiting communication access between various parties for confidentiality and security reasons.”

 

Our Impact

“The solution developed by Stellium enhances the M365 digital workspace, tailored specifically for schools. Teachers and administrators manage teams and resources through the portal, and from there, everything happens within M365. This solution allows users to work with a single, optimized platform that meets their specific needs. The integration of courses and classes into Microsoft Teams is a dream come true: students and teachers are automatically placed in the appropriate Teams for each course. This way, they can immediately start working, sharing, tracking, and grading digital documents within the classroom.“

– Jeanbourquin, Head of Digital School Education, Canton of Jura

 

Our Strategic Approach

To address the client’s challenges and plan the project, we conducted several meetings to understand their needs, objectives, and bottlenecks. This step allowed us to tailor our solution to their requirements and develop a clear implementation roadmap.

To meet customer demand, we focused on 3 main strategies:

1. Configure and segment their Microsoft 365 tenant using Information Barrier (IB)
2. Develop a web portal for school directors to manage the school’s resources (rooms & equipment)
3. Extend the web portal to allow teachers to see and create Teams for their classes or courses

 

 

Microsoft 365 Segmentation with Information Barrier

In this step, the main objectives of this phase were:

• Define boundaries between schools to create segments and set up communication controls.
• Prevent communication between students from different schools, limiting their communication and visibility.
• Enable communication and collaboration among all teachers and administrative staff.

We used the Microsoft Purview V2 Information Barrier to control communication, collaboration and collaboration between users on Exchange, SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive.

We created several segments (For each school, and a transversal one for all teachers and administrative staff) which allowed us to involve users in several segments because EDU Jura tenant includes all the teachers and pupils from all the schools.

The segments are based on dynamic groups that rely on Entra ID attributes to facilitate member management.

 

 

Developing a Web Portal for School Administrators

In this step, the main objectives of this phase were:

• Enable directors to manage resources (rooms and equipment) via a web portal.
• Manage high-privilege permissions on Exchange Online so that school principals can operate autonomously without needing specific authorizations.

We developed a web portal hosted on Azure to allow school directors to manage their resources without specific permissions on Exchange Online.

To go a little further, we detail the different steps we carried out:

1. We defined the governance of resources in Exchange Online.
2. So that each actor of each establishment can access their portal (depending on their institution(s)), we defined the management of resource authorizations: “fully manage” for directors and “only book” for teachers.
3. We included these resources in the “Information Barrier” segments to ensure visibility from Outlook for each actor.
4. We developed an asynchronous process to synchronize resources created, updated and deleted from the web portal to Exchange Online. Thus, teachers can access resources from Outlook and reserve them for each institution in which they work. This allows them to share a single calendar for each resource and to see the availability of resources.
5. We implemented authentication and authorization on the web portal to ensure that directors can only manage the resources they should.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Expanding the Portal for Class and Course Management

After developing and implementing the web portal for principals and teachers, we extended this tool to allow teachers to be able manage their courses and classes through the portal.

 

Establishing Microsoft Teams Governance

We established Microsoft Teams governance similarly to how we managed resources in the previous step. Specifically, we defined and configured Teams Policies for Teachers and Students to align with the predefined rules.

 

Data Synchronization Process

An asynchronous process was implemented to synchronize and curate data (classes and courses) between their school system “Cloée” and the web portal (School Portal).

 

 

Creation of teams step by teachers

We extended the web portal by developing new features to allow teachers to create teams based on their classes or courses.

In this step, it was essential to implement a security system to restrict actions based on user roles so that teachers could see their own classes and courses in the schools they are part of.

Principals can create additional teams for specific collaboration use cases, ensuring that security and governance rules are maintained.

Finally, the automatic lifecycle management of Teams based on the current school year was implemented via a recurring system to check the validity of the class/course and create a notification system for teachers to anticipate the end of life of Teams.

 

 

 

Key Benefits

The implementation of the School Portal provided several benefits to the Department of Education in the Canton of Jura. These include:

• Operational Efficiency: Delegating room and equipment management significantly reduced the workload for the IT department and school principals, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks.
• Enhanced Collaboration: The integration of Microsoft Teams facilitated better communication and collaboration among teachers and students, leading to improved educational outcomes. In addition, it allowed teachers to decide if they wanted or not to activate a Teams group with each class group (a non-mandatory option).
• Confidentiality and security: The Information Barrier ensured that communication and visibility were controlled, maintaining confidentiality and security across the schools.

 

Technologies and Solutions Implemented

Main partner

Technologies used

Exchange Online Calendar and resource management.	Information Barrier V2 Communication and collaboration control.	SharePoint Document sharing and collaboration.	Teams Communication and collaboration.	Azure Web portal hosting and security.

 

Roles and Responsibilities

• Cloud Solution Architect: Responsible for the overall design and architecture of the solution.
• Microsoft 365 Specialist: Define and configure Exchange Online resources and implement Team policies.
• Cloud Developer: Develop and integrate the web portal.

 

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