Chromebooks And Google Workspace For Education Plus Provide Greater Value When Used Together

Forrester conducted two Total Economic Impact studies commissioned by Google examining the educational, budgetary, security, and organizational value that educational institutions have achieved with Google Workspace for Education Plus and Chromebooks in Education.¹ This abstract focuses on how these groups have partnered with Google to leverage these solutions and the outcomes they achieved. The purpose of this abstract is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of using both Education Plus and Chromebooks in Education.

Prior to their partnership with Google, the interviewees’ organizations struggled to adapt technology in the classrooms. IT groups were burdened with significant costs to deploy and manage devices, students had class time reduced while waiting for devices to startup each day, and socioeconomically disadvantaged students missed the educational benefits of having their own dedicated device. In addition, administrations struggled with a variety of third-party tools to run their day-to-day operations, which further increased the burden on IT. Legacy solutions created additional problems including system unreliability, difficulty in scaling, limited functionality, inadequate telemetry, and inability to improve the security posture of the school infrastructure.

They adopted Chromebooks and Education Plus to tackle a variety of use cases in their effort to support the learning of students; save teachers’ time; relieve IT management of their heavy workloads; provide the best return on the resources of the schools, parents, and guardians; improve security; and improve collaboration and functionality for educators. Decision-makers chose to invest in Google tools and devices to meet the needs of all these groups.

INVESTMENT DRIVERS FOR Educational Organizations

Educational organizations shared several goals prior to investing in Chromebooks and Workspace for Education Plus, including:

• Improve educational outcomes and reduce teacher workload. A primary driver for investing in Google was to improve educational outcomes for students. Due to the higher costs of legacy devices, many educational institutions were not able to provide their students with dedicated laptops or tablets, restricting access to educational tools in the classroom and at home.
  
  Educational leaders also sought to free up time for their teachers, who often struggled with technical difficulties such as long device startup times and disjointed classroom management systems. These issues cut into classroom time and required long work hours, limiting teacher effectiveness.
  
  The district edtech coordinator of a North America K-12 school district said: “The reason we went Chromebooks was because the battery life is better, and it only takes 8 seconds to load to start up a Chromebook when compared to [legacy devices]. That, and they’re just easy to manage.”
  
  The same interviewee also said: “For us to consider moving back to [a legacy OS], at minimum, you’d have to find us a device under $400 that can boot up and get to the internet in less than 8 seconds like a Chromebook can. We only have 55 minutes each period, so it’s dead in the water if it needs to stop and update.”
  
  A teacher from a K-12 Asia Pacific school said: “[Educators] should choose Education Plus because it gives you so many features that can be used together. You can do so much collaboration that cannot be used with other applications. Everything is integrated in Google’s features.”

• Allow for and enhance collaboration, curriculum management, and student performance monitoring. Interviewees looked to Education Plus to meet their organizations’ needs like attendance tracking, assignment and quality management, and integrated videoconferencing. Education Plus combined with Chromebooks allowed for a seamless experience that provided the full functionality and telemetry that educators required.
• Operate within school budgets. Leaders of educational institutions had to balance the needs of their students and teachers with budgetary constraints. Chromebook and Education Plus met the learning, teaching, administrative, and security needs of the schools at lower costs while allowing educational organizations to operate responsibly and within budget.

• Reduce manual IT labor. Educational leaders sought to reduce the complexity and excess labor associated with the educational hardware and collaboration suites in previous environments. These legacy solutions were often difficult and burdensome to maintain and existed in separate systems, taking IT and staff members away from higher-value work.
  
  A major driver in investing in Google’s solutions was to free up employees so they could propel initiatives that would drive meaningful change rather than maintain the status quo. Another major driver was to consolidate systems into Google’s standardized administration console that was easier for administrators to use and manage.
  
  The director of IT of a North American K-12 school district said: “We’re moving in standardizing and collaboration with Google Workspace. It definitely has helped with adoption, training, and support.”
  
  The chief information officer of a South American higher education instruction said: “The ease of management is critical for us. Google is very easy to manage. I have an impression that other tools are not so easy.”
• Secure infrastructure and student and teacher devices. Prior to moving to Google, many educational institutions struggled with frequent security breaches in their organizations. IT leaders turned to Education Plus to help them reduce the number and impact of phishing incidents. In addition, educational leaders turned to Chromebooks to avoid ransomware attacks and move away from on-site infrastructure to Google Cloud.

Key Results For Educational Organizations

Interviewees consistently achieved several benefits by investing in Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education Plus. When applied to the composite organization, these improvements result in quantifiable value to students, teachers, IT staff, administrators, and other stakeholders. Key results include:

• Improved student time on task by 18 hours per year. Of utmost importance to interviewed educational leaders was student outcomes and how Chromebook and Google Workspace for Education impacted student learning and time on task. Interviewees shared that giving students their own individual Chromebooks enabled access to a wide range of powerful tools and dramatically improved the classroom experience.
  
  IT leaders sought to empower teachers with the best technological resources available. Leaders found these efforts translated into greater educational outcomes, such as time on task, improved national rankings, and material comprehension. Interviewees shared that leveraging Chromebook and Google Workspace for Education allowed them to perform better than other school peer groups.
  
  The IT superintendent of a Latin American K-12 school system said, “Having more technology in the classroom is extremely positive for our students, and they get more access to qualified information.”
  
  The same interviewee also said: “We’re investing in [Chromebooks and Google Workspace] because we want to be able to improve and move our schools up in the national ranking. We already have a lot of qualitative data about seeing improvement based on digital platforms.”
  
  The IT manager of a school system in EMEA said, “I’ve noticed students prefer to take a test on Chromebook instead of paper because they get feedback faster, and teachers can actually read their handwriting.”
  
   

• Reduced teacher labor by 42 hours per year. Google Classroom, along with other services within Google Workspace for Education, gave teachers tools that made leading classrooms significantly easier. Students could participate much faster through their devices, and teachers could gain insight into which students were struggling and focus their attention on them. In addition, Chromebooks started faster and had fewer technical issues when using features such as screencast and teacher-student chat.
  
  The director of strategic partnerships of an EMEA K-12 school trust said: “Every teacher has access to Chromebooks and [Google Workspace for Education Plus] in front of them during their lessons, and it makes them able to be more efficient. Every child has access to a device that makes lessons more engaging and therefore makes the children more likely to come. Chromebook and [Google Workspace for Education Plus] are a common thread of how we make our school more efficient.”
  
  The IT manager of an EMEA school system said: “The biggest difference we’ve noticed is from our teachers spending much less time to start a lesson. When you have a Chromebook, you just open it, and it works. With [legacy devices], sometimes they were busy for 5 to 10 minutes just to get all the students going. Feedback and revisions are also easier to keep track of, and teachers can give students corrections as they are working on assignments, rather than waiting for it all to be complete.”
  
  The district edtech coordinator of a North American K-12 school district said: “Teachers can use [Google Workspace for Education] to check the version history of a document and see who actually did what work. A lot of these tools have opened the lines of communication with students and let multiple kids work on one assignment together.”
• Reduced cost of student devices by 50% and collaboration suite by 67%. In addition to being purchased at a lower cost, educational decision-makers found that Chromebooks lasted longer than the legacy devices they had previously used. Interviewees attributed this in part to the cloud-based nature of Chromebooks and that hardware requirements did not change significantly over time. In addition, Google Workspace for Education Plus cost less than the legacy collaboration suites used by the interviewees, which saved additional budget.
  
  The director of strategic partnerships at an EMEA school trust said: “If we bought a [legacy tablet] and a Chromebook on the same day, I reckon that the Chromebook would get at least five times as much use. You can use a Chromebook all day, every day, and they’re still going strong. On the other hand, for some of those [legacy tablets], you get a new update after two and a half years and they go to a halt.”
  
  A North American university saved approximately $100 per student per year by moving to Education Plus. This savings resulted from no longer needing to provide those students with licenses to alternative educational platforms and cloud storage.
  
  The IT business partner of a K-12 educational group in Europe said, “We’ve managed to save significantly on various applications and programs by using Google for cloud-based [services].”
   

• Avoided additional costs of legacy solutions made redundant by Google. Interviewees found that they saved a third or more of their previous cost of third-party services and accessibility tools due to the tools and services already included with Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals. Additional budget was saved by organizations that no longer needed to purchase peripheral devices for students who moved from legacy tablets.
  
  A North American school district avoided paying $30,000 per year for an email spam filter because Education Plus provided this functionality. The district saved an additional $80,000 because it no longer needed support to securely maintain the email server.
   

• Saved IT 76% of their time managing teacher and student devices, 80% of their time compiling reports, and 98% of their time resolving phishing attacks. A director of IT at a North American K12 school district said that staff reduced the time to fully complete an e-record request from two full days to 1 hour. He mentioned that Education Plus’s Vault tool (which is included in both Education Fundamentals and Education Plus) was the major reason for this improvement because it became significantly easier to find records and relevant information for requests. This saved a significant amount of effort for between 12 and 24 requests per year.
  
  Access to Google Docs’ collaborative function as well as having shared Google Drive and Google Calendar (which is included in both Education Fundamentals and Education Plus) helped interviewees’ institutions to improve administrative efficiency. Interviewees noted that these tools allowed for easier collaboration between administrative groups and individual staff members, saving teams multiple hours each month.
  
  A school system in Asia Pacific was able to reduce the amount of time on device management from 420 hours per year for legacy devices to less than 5 hours for Chromebooks — equivalent to nearly a 99% reduction. Much of this improvement was attributed to Chromebooks not requiring regular updates for local systems and infrastructure.
  
  The district edtech coordinator of a North American K-12 school district said: “Our IT department does not touch a single Chromebook in our district. We’re at 15,000 devices, and our IT department does nothing with Chrome. It’s all managed by our student program. It’s a super-easy program to manage.” The same interviewee also said: “I can’t even imagine how many more people you would need to manage in a [legacy] environment because they’re high maintenance. … Management is 100 times easier in Chrome[OS] than [legacy], for sure.”
   

• Avoided ransomware attacks on student and teacher devices and reduce phishing attacks by 95%. When asked, no interviewee reported successful ransomware attacks on Chromebooks in their school system. This was largely attributed to built-in security tools from ChromeOS, such as sandboxing, verified boot, automatic updates, and limited access to local files.
  
  The board of education director of an Asia Pacific K-12 school system said: “Chromebook has the features necessary to achieve our objectives. It is particularly superior to other operating systems in terms of security measures.”
  
  The edtech project manager of a North American school district said, “Chromebooks eliminate the scare of viruses and potentially downloading harmful software."
  
  Each organization using Education Plus that tracked phishing incidents saw a significant reduction in both phishing attempt emails that made it to inboxes and the number of phishing incidents that did occur. Interviewees from these organizations noted that after upgrading to Education Plus, their previously problematic phishing incidents dropped to virtually zero. This was largely attributed to Gmail providing better out-of-the-box security and filtering than the previously used email services and to Security Center improving monitoring and threat prevention capabilities.
  
  Interviewees from multiple institutions said IT staff had been using custom scripts to manually search for and delete emails each time there was a phishing incident. After this process was completed, additional time was required for resolution. The total amount of time this process took varied by institution, but averaged close to 20 labor hours per incident. However, some major incidents took hundreds of labor hours to fully resolve.
  
  By using the investigation tool included with Education Plus, these teams only needed to spend a total of 15 to 30 minutes to resolve a phishing incident when it did occur.
   

Appendix A: Endnotes