Overview
Enhancing digital learning opportunities
The Department for Education provides a range of integrated education, training and child development services to benefit children, young people and families.
The Department is responsible for approximately 900 sites statewide with approximately 30,000 staff and over 170,000 students, with a strategic mission to broaden learning opportunities for every student in every classroom through technology. Over the past five years the Department has greatly enhanced connectivity across the state school network to set the foundations for advanced digital education opportunities.
“We're focused on building digital literacy for our students and our staff; skills that are not only proven to sort of be required as students progress through their education into higher education or into tertiary education, but also these are skills that industry are telling us are more required going forward.
The Department’s role is to ensure that we're doing that in a way and that every student has access to quality digital outcomes irrespective of where they're located, irrespective of which school they go to, or which socioeconomic sort of area that they reside,” says Daniel Hughes, Chief Information Officer of the Department for Education S.A.
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0+sites to potentially benefit from IoT-based aquaculture program
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0data points per day across five water quality metrics
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0+South Australian public schools now with potential to access aquaculture farming program
Challenge
Equitable access for staff and students across South Australia
South Australia’s Department for Education is on a fast-moving mission to upgrade technology systems across the state school network to enable new and innovative teaching opportunities. In 2018, just 7% of S.A. schools were connected with fibre, while in 2023 there are now 99.6%. In 2022, a Digital Strategy was set in motion to build new educational opportunities upon this digital backbone.
“We are making sure we provide equal opportunities for every student in every classroom through the use of technology. We’re making sure devices are provisioned equally throughout all our schools and we are now turning our attention to what technologies and providers we can work with to ensure those foundations are lit up in ways that engage students," says Hughes.
In seeking opportunities that deliver the right investment value, the Department wanted to find ways to apply smart technology that had a clear integration with existing school curriculum goals. Ideas that held the opportunity to bring 21st Century skill development to students so that they were exploring technologies that will hold clear value well into the future.
In seeking out high quality projects to explore as part of the new strategy, the Department was also eager to find STEM-based activities that would be accessible from any school across the state, metro or rural, while providing learning opportunities across a variety of topic areas.
One area of that held such potential was an aquaculture farming program conducted in South Australia. The program was a data-driven concept where water quality was measured regularly to understand how these quality variables impact on breeding and growth. Beyond the local schools with direct access, there was potential to extend digital access to schools across the state, including metro areas far removed from the regions.
Hughes says, “This program teaches so much but had significant administrative burden. What could technology do to support the program and capture better inputs for students to explore?”
Solution
Unlocking education opportunities through IoT data capture and cloud dashboards
Working with Telstra Purple, the Department decided on a five school proof of concept to trial an Internet of Things based sensor array to perform remote monitoring in an automated fashion and feed the data back to a cloud platform for student analysis.
The aquaculture farms had required manual pen-and-paper data capture processes, creating errors that limited the opportunity for data investigation. They also required a lot of manual workload on weekends and school holidays to keep the fish healthy, with a high risk of fish loss if problems occurred between manual visits.
In the planning stage, Telstra Purple worked with the pilot schools to develop a set of success criteria to ensure the solution targeted the ideal outcomes.
This included features such as:
- reducing the burden on teachers and students to perform manual visits to monitor the farm during weekends and school holidays
- providing critical alerts if there was something wrong at the farm
- creating better data analytics opportunities for students to identify trends over time and identify opportunities to improve farming yields
- granting students a greater sense of ‘ownership’ through confidence in the water monitoring systems.
Telstra Purple partnered with Verge Solutions to provide the schools with sensor devices that report back remotely over Telstra’s NB-IoT network to a friendly browser-based platform, Cumulocity. This would deliver on the desire for easier monitoring of aquaculture farms, deliver more accurate data through automation, and create the opportunity to make the data available to schools anywhere through this powerful yet simple-to-use online platform.
Verge Solutions performs all staging work on the devices prior to delivery to ensure they are ready to be plugged in, placed in the farming tank, and from there will immediately begin data delivery.
“We used to have to do a time-consuming water chemical analysis with a lot of human error. The sensors we receive from Verge are incredibly easy to setup. Very plug and play. Just run through a few calibration activities and 24/7 water quality data is coming in,” says Carol Hille, Senior Agriculture Teacher, Lucindale Area School.
The use of Telstra’s Narrowband IoT network (NB-IoT) removed the need for any further complexity at the aquaculture farm by using devices that send data directly to the cloud without the need for local networking.
Telstra Purple came to this with a willingness to listen and understand what the opportunity looks like, not with assumptions already made or just trying to sell.
Daniel Hughes
CIO, Department for Education S.A.
Approach
Automated data delivery to Cumulocity cloud
The automated sensors managed by Verge Solutions use Australian developed and manufactured Captis Environmental IoT data loggers, which deliver the direct NB-IoT connection. This logger reads data from an array of five sensors measuring water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, nitrate and ammonia levels. Sensor options could also be added for more insights, such as light levels, wind speed, or a range of other options. One sensor array and a Captis are setup for each tank in the farm.
The sensors run on mains power to take readings every 15 minutes, with the battery-powered Captis unit waking once per day to send all 96 sensor readings to the cloud. This preserves battery life to give the Captis a five-year operating life on a single battery.
Should a sensor reading be outside defined limits, an alarm will be triggered to send an alert via Captis immediately. The alert will then arrive at the Cumulocity dashboard where further alarms are triggered to send messages to team members for attention. This balances the desire for battery longevity with the need for problems to be addressed quickly to keep the farm safe.
The units can be installed with additional antennas to ensure signal strength is adequate. For the aquaculture farm, no additional antennas were needed to reach Telstra’s NB-IoT.
With this stream of 96 readings per day at precise 15 minute intervals, the Cumulocity dashboard can offer additional insights that the Department had been eager to unlock. Students across all pilot schools can now perform more detailed analysis of trusted data points to search for useful trends that can be used to make farming decisions.
“Schools now have access to a broader set of automated data that they can learn from. In the classroom this can be used in a lot more subjects. It might be science or it might be maths, along with the aquaculture programs themselves," says Chris Barry, Senior Business Engagement Officer, Department of Education S.A.
Impact
Less manual burden and wider educational opportunities
The pilot program has delivered significant new learning opportunities for South Australia’s educators. The schools directly involved with the pilot have had a greatly enhanced experience with data collection and aquaculture farm management, while the new online dashboard creates an easy path to opening up the farming data to schools across the state.
For the rural students involved with the existing programs, the enhanced IoT data processes are also insightful for the farming communities they are often already involved with. Farming parents are seeing the dashboards and data insights that are now possible, and their potential to improve farming outcomes. It’s a window to new possibilities and for students a fertile training ground for using the farming tools of the future.
The Department continues to strive for innovation and digitisation opportunities that elevate learning and increase inclusivity. This pilot program achieves all these aims, with a particularly strong path to giving metro students the chance to participate in agricultural studies in a real world context without needing to travel to the aquaculture site to learn.
“When things work here in South Australia, we’re a good size for making things become systemic pretty quickly. Our schools are creative, innovative, and looking for opportunities to increase engagement and here technology plays a role in helping to achieve that,” says Hughes.
The Department is exploring enhancements to the program for ongoing aquaculture farming education. Along with the expansion of data access to other schools, they are also looking into additional monitoring systems, such as power monitoring and water flow monitoring to cover additional points of potential failure and further reduce risks to the fish.
Hughes says, “Telstra has been transformational for us, and I hope this partnership approach continues because then we’ll see more things like this blossom.”
Related solutions and capabilities
Internet of Things
Explore IoT from Telstra, to unlock a future of improved efficiency, better customer experiences, and opportunities to discover and grow revenue streams.
Telstra Purple
Drawing on our rich expertise as a powerhouse tech provider, Telstra Purple delivers digital transformation for Australian business. We do it in a way that other managed services and tech consultancies can’t.
IoT Platform
An online dashboard of tools and data feeds, Cumulocity is a one-stop IoT platform for device management, data collection, data visualisation, application development and runtime analytics.
