“Connected” is a word that comes up frequently when Peter Buckmaster speaks—and understandably so. As director of digital experience design for New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education, Buckmaster supports a massive transformation that’s all about connection. Connecting schools and teachers with digital resources. Connecting parents with the right information. And most importantly, connecting students with the digital skills they need to succeed.
NSW Department of Education serves 800,000 students across 2,200 schools - each with its own website. School websites are an important piece of the digital strategy, providing a consistent point of contact between schools and their communities. But schools have limited time and resources and it typically falls to teachers and principals to keep websites updated.
“Our goal was to create a connected network of school websites, standardise digital content and experiences and start down a path toward increasing personalisation,” says Buckmaster. “At the same time, we needed to make it easy for schools to publish and manage their own content.”
2,200 schools migrate to the 21st century
NSW Department of Education implemented Adobe Experience Manager Sites Managed Services as the foundation for its network of school websites. “We created a hub-and-spoke model that allows us to syndicate content across thousands of sites,” says Buckmaster. “We migrated 2,200 school websites, as well as our own intranet and public site, Education NSW.”
Adobe Customer Solutions used customer-centred design thinking and agile methodology to produce results fast. After a six-week discovery process, the Adobe team built ready-to-use templates and components with easy drag-and-drop functionality to make it easy for schools to customise their digital experiences. The team also trained 6,500 staff on how to manage content for their sites.
Adobe Experience Manager centralises website management and consolidates assets for more consistent messaging around state-wide policies and announcements. A central content team can push global content out to all school sites, 1,300 Facebook pages and mobile apps from a central location within minutes. From back-to-school campaigns to help parents and students get ready for school to health and safety messaging that outlines requirements, all schools receive the same information for their news feeds.
NSW Department of Education comms and engagement team ran a maths campaign across school locations called Maths Trains Brains, designed to get parents to engage in maths with their children. The team used Experience Manager to build a content repository where parents could access content and get comfortable with concepts. It also included educational content on everyday topics, such as maths in cooking, architecture and money that parents could work through with their children.
At the same time, schools maintain control over local content and the look and feel of their sites. Thousands of content authors learnt to use the templates and components to publish news and updates for students and their families. Since the beginning of the project, the organisation has created 1.5 million digital assets and published 1.6 million web pages.
A consolidated library of high-resolution images and videos in Adobe Experience Manager Assets reins in different versions of assets published across different sites and in multiple device-specific formats. Adobe Experience Manager Assets also saves the organisation time by automatically compressing files and allowing them to track asset usage.
