Chromebooks In Education Provide Affordability, Manageability, And Increased Learning Time In Asia Pacific Schools

Google commissioned Forrester Consulting to interview 18 representatives at nine educational organizations and conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with   Chromebook in Education as well as Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals .¹ This abstract will focus on educational organizations in Asia Pacific use of Chromebook and its value to their teachers, students, faculty, and organizations.

For this Spotlight, Forrester spoke with four education decision-makers in Asia Pacific about their school districts’ experience with Chromebooks in Education:

• Board of education chief manager and board of education director of a city school system with 14,000 students.
• Board of education director of a city school system with 2,000 students.
• Vice director of a school with fewer than 1,000 students.

These decision-makers in Asia Pacific faced many considerations and challenges to select the best educational technologies for their schools. Their selection would need to enhance the learning of students, save teachers time, relieve IT management of their heavy workloads, and provide the best return on the resources of the schools, parents, and guardians. This was made more difficult as many leaders in Asia Pacific served students and teachers with varying degrees of technical ability, so they needed to find a technology that was both easy to use and equipped with the tools needed by more advanced users

Asia Pacific educational leaders chose to invest in Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals to meet the needs of all these groups. Chromebooks were selected based on many criteria, but total cost of ownership, ease of setup management, speed of startup, built-in security, and overall performance were often regarded as the most important considerations in Asia Pacific schools. Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals was selected as the learning platform in part because it took advantage of the browser-based ChromeOS and worked particularly well on Chromebooks. Some schools in Asia Pacific also used Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals to help them move to more cloud-based operations.

INVESTMENT DRIVERS For Asia Pacific Educational Organizations

Asia Pacific educational organizations struggled with many issues prior to investing in Chromebooks, including:

• Hardware issues limiting teacher effectiveness and student outcomes. Students struggled to work effectively with legacy educational devices as they took longer to start up and update, delaying class start times and costing them learning time each day. In addition, teachers found that the short battery life of their legacy devices tethered them to their desks and prevented them from moving about the classroom.
• Missed educational benefits from students not having regular access to devices. Many schools were not able to offer students regular access to devices due to the high cost of legacy laptops and tablets. Parents and school leaders were concerned that students who did not have access would not be as prepared for an increasingly digital world and that teachers would not be able to take advantage of powerful online resources.
• Growing technological disparity between socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Many school systems had student bodies with a wide mix of backgrounds and socioeconomic status. Educational leaders found that students whose families could afford computers at home had advantages over those who could only use computers at school. Leaders sought to provide an environment where students could not only have their own dedicated device but could take it home each day. The high cost of legacy laptops prevented this.
• Excessive ongoing IT labor for device deployment and management. Educational IT groups were often tasked with supporting new technological programs without additional resources or funding. As schools began adding legacy devices, IT staff struggled to scale environments because many devices required individual-level management and specialized software or equipment. This took staff away from other high-priority work and slowed down rollout by months.

Key Features of Chromebook And Google Workspace For Education Fundamentals

The interviewees’ organizations chose to invest in Chromebook and Google Workspace for Education Plus for the following reasons:

• Allow each student and teacher to have regular access to devices. Some schools had not yet been able to provide each student or teacher with regular access to devices due to the significant expense of their legacy devices or difficulty using low-power tablets.
  
  Educational leaders saw Chromebook as an opportunity to provide students and teachers with the benefits of educational technology much faster due to the lower initial cost as well as the longevity of the hardware. Chromebook was also seen as a form factor better suited for learning compared with tablets, which did not include integrated physical trackpads and keyboards.
• Provide improved battery life and startup time performance. Other schools in Asia Pacific already had dedicated legacy devices for their students but found that their long startup time and short battery life caused frequent disruptions in the classroom and limited learning time. For these schools, giving time back to teachers and students was critical to meet educational standards and expectations.
• Reduce burden on IT teams and advance migration to cloud operations. Asia Pacific educational leaders prioritized the time of their IT staff toward high-value work and proactively looked for technologies that could reduce mundane, repetitive tasks. Chromebooks were particularly attractive to these schools as much of the deployment and ongoing management was automated and allowed IT groups to move to higher-value strategic projects.
• Security at the OS level. Asia Pacific educational leaders were eager to reduce any vulnerabilities in their systems and often had to meet very strict security requirements. ChromeOS environments were observed as more secure than legacy environments, which provided an additional reason to select them as a standard device. Interviewees attributed this security improvement to Chromebooks’ sandboxing, verified boot, automatic updates, and limited access to local files.

Key Results For Educational Organizations in Asia Pacific

The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations include:

Met budget goals with lower hardware and peripheral costs. Educational leaders in Asia Pacific prioritized the needs of their organization and constituents as a top priority. Chromebooks were chosen, in part, because they were seen as a responsible use of resources that could allow the organizations to efficiently meet student, teacher, and IT needs.

• Reduced initial hardware costs. All interviewees, including those in Asia Pacific educational organizations, found that Chromebooks cost their organizations less per device than the legacy devices they had either used in the past or had compared in their own business case. While the exact device price point varied by educational group, Chromebooks were found to be at most half as expensive as a comparable legacy device for students and teachers alike.
• Reduced long-term hardware costs. In addition to the 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 their hardware requirements did not change as quickly.
• Reduced need for third-party accessibility tools and services. 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. This provided even greater cost savings over time, allowing budget to be freed up for additional investment.

Freed up IT time for higher-value work. Chromebooks were significantly easier for IT groups to deploy and manage because much of the labor was automated and performed at scale through Google’s ChromeOS device management service, Chrome Education Upgrade. The saved labor, software, and hardware resources could instead be focused on improving the school’s environment and completing new initiatives instead of basic management and maintenance of endpoint devices.

• Automated device and account setup for initial deployment . IT groups in Asia Pacific educational organizations deployed Chromebooks significantly faster than had previously been possible with their legacy devices. Interviewees attributed this to ChromeOS being browser-based, removing the need for individual device imaging and custom setup. The composite organization saves 76% of IT time previously spent on device management.
• Spent less time on repair. IT groups also saved time with device repair as Chromebooks provide easier self-service options for students and teachers. This reduced the number of requests IT groups received and allowed them to spend their time on more important tasks.
• Spent less time with automated updates. Chromebooks in Asia Pacific educational organizations did not need the same manual updates and relied less on local infrastructure than had legacy devices, meaning there were fewer systems to upgrade and update over time. This saved considerable time for IT staff on an ongoing basis and allowed for hundreds of hours to be reallocated.

Improved organizational security and reduced vulnerabilities. Interviewed IT leaders found that the number of security incidents and breaches their school system or region experienced fell after migration to Chromebooks. This was attributed to Chromebook’s cloud-based OS and built-in security features from Google. Interviewees discussed the following advantages:

• Avoided successful ransomware attacks on Chromebooks. Educational and IT leaders in Asia Pacific schools found that security features in ChromeOS dramatically reduced the vulnerabilities to malicious attacks, especially ransomware. These features included sandboxing, verified boot, automatic updates, and limited access to local files. None of the interviewees Forrester spoke with had experienced a successful ransomware attack on any of the Chromebooks in their organizations.
• Reduced other security breaches. Interviewees also found that other security breaches were reduced as their organizations moved teachers and students from legacy devices to Chromebooks. In addition to the tools already discussed, interviewees attributed this improvement to Chromebook data being more secure as it was cloud-based and stored on Google systems as opposed to all data being stored locally on the device.

Provided better use of time for students and teachers. Students and teachers saved hours each year by using Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals.

• Improved student time on task. Students in the composite organization save 36 hours of time each year as Chromebook boots up faster and has automatic updates. Assuming that half of this time can be successfully reallocated toward time on task, students can improve their time on task by 18 hours each year.
  

  
  Educational leaders in Asia Pacific found that Chromebooks improved time on task and learning outcomes for their students in other ways. For example, the lower hardware costs meant that providing each student with their own device could be achieved within budget for some schools. More students could then have access to educational technologies, such as Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals, which significantly improved their learning outcomes as compared to classes where devices were shared.

  In addition, many Asia Pacific students could take Chromebooks home with them after class and benefit from the educational tools as they completed homework and prepared for class the next day. This had not previously been possible when students did not have regular access to devices.

• Reduced teacher labor. Students were not the only ones who benefited from faster startup times and reduced update downtime. Teachers in Asia Pacific spent less time waiting for students to have their devices ready and could instead reallocate that time toward instruction. In addition, tools included with Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals allowed them to communicate and schedule easier with parents and guardians. Other tools in Google Classroom allowed for easier lesson preparation and better use of teacher time outside of the classroom.

  
  Teachers in the composite organization save a little over an hour each week with Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals. Assuming 75% of this time is reallocated toward higher-value work, each teacher regains 42 hours each year.

Delivered additional benefits in Asia Pacific. Educational leaders in Asia Pacific mentioned other improvements they observed that could not be quantified as easily. However, these provided important benefits to their organizations and made impactful differences in the lives of students, teachers, parents, guardians, and staff.

• Reduced student performance gaps due to socioeconomic differences. Educational organizations in Asia Pacific that participated in Forrester’s study served students with a wide range of means and socioeconomic backgrounds. For students whose parents could not afford to buy them their own device, having a regular access to Chromebooks from their school provided them a new world of tools and skills that had not been previously available. Not only did this help students improve their short-term educational outcomes, it also better prepared them for future employment where these technologies are heavily leveraged.
• Benefited from seamless integration between Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals. Chromebooks are designed to be especially effective with Google Workspace for Education in terms of performance, functionality, and access to additional third-party tools. These enhancements provided even greater benefit to students and teachers in Asia Pacific whose organizations invested in Chromebooks.
• Helped engage parents and guardians in the learning process, further improving educational outcomes. Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals, including Google Classroom, allowed teachers in Asia Pacific to engage with students’ parents and guardians on a deeper level than had been possible before. This reduced the burden on teachers to collaborate with large numbers of families, provided greater transparency and visibility into student progress, and improved educational outcomes for students.
• Reduced repair costs. Asia Pacific educational organizations saved long-term costs as repairing Chromebooks was less expensive than repairing legacy devices. This was attributed in part to the simpler process of replacing keyboards and other components as well as the ease of resetting the device itself.
• Achieved savings from cloud operations. Some Asia Pacific educational organizations had managed their own infrastructure on-site and incurred heavy costs of maintaining the servicing that infrastructure each year. Moving to Google Cloud further reduced their costs as much of this infrastructure and management was no longer needed and could be retired.
• Reduced environmental impact. Educators were eager to find ways to reduce their environmental impact in the future and expected that the longer usable life of Chromebooks meant a reduction in e-waste.