Chromebooks In Education Provide Affordability, Manageability, And Increased Learning Time In EMEA 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 how educational organizations in EMEA use Chromebook and its value to their teachers, students, faculty, and organizations.

For this Spotlight, Forrester spoke with four education leaders in EMEA about their schools’ experience with Chromebooks in Education:

• Director of strategic partnerships and director of digital teaching and learning at a school with 4,500 students.
• IT administrator and IT manager of a school with 1,800 students.

These decision-makers weighed many considerations and faced numerous challenges to select the best educational technologies for their schools. The solution they chose 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 schools’, parents’, and guardians’ resources. This was made more difficult as many leaders in EMEA served students and teachers with varying degrees of technical ability, so they needed to find technology that was both easy to use and equipped with the tools needed by more advanced users.

The four EMEA educational leaders chose to invest in Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education 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 EMEA schools. The interviewees’ schools selected Google Workspace for Education as the learning platform in part because it took advantage of the browser-based ChromeOS and worked particularly well on Chromebooks. Some schools in EMEA also used Google Workspace for Education to help them move to more cloud-based operations.

INVESTMENT DRIVERS For EMEA Educational Organizations

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

• Hardware issues that limited 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.
• Difficulty addressing accessibility needs while maintaining a unified technological platform . Students’ diverse accessibility needs required educational leaders to provide them with special devices since many legacy devices lacked built-in accessibility tools. Not only did this cost more, but students who used different devices often felt they did not belong with the other students. Additionally, teachers had to learn how to use multiple types of devices in their classrooms, which took time away from their classroom preparation.

• 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 new 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 Chromebooks And Google Workspace For Education

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

• Improved battery life and startup performance. Other schools in EMEA 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.
• Overall value for systemwide adoption. 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.
• Interchangeable hardware to avoid delays and issues when students needed to change devices. The director of digital teaching and learning of an EMEA K-12 school trust said: “Chromebooks are interchangeable. If a student breaks one, they just go to the library, turn on the new Chromebook, and get back to work. It’s a whole ecosystem where work is device-agnostic. [Legacy] devices are specialized and can’t compete with a system like that.”

Key Results For Educational Organizations in EMEA

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

Met budget goals with lower hardware and peripheral costs. Educational leaders in EMEA prioritized the needs of their organizations and constituents as a top priority. They chose Chromebooks 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 EMEA educational organizations, found that Chromebooks cost less per device than the legacy devices they had either used in the past or had compared in their own business cases. While the exact device price point varied by educational group, Chromebooks were found to be at most half as expensive as comparable legacy devices for students and teachers alike.
• 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. This provided even greater cost savings over time, allowing budget to be freed up for additional investment.
• Reduced long-term hardware costs. 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 Chromebooks’ cloud-based nature and the relative stability of their hardware requirements, which did not change as quickly as competing devices.

Better use of IT managers’ and administrators’ time. 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 Chrome Education Upgrade with Google Admin console. 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. Chromebooks:

• Automated device and account setup for initial deployment. IT groups in EMEA 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 EMEA 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 districts experienced fell after migration to Chromebooks. This was attributed to Chromebook’s cloud-based OS and built-in security features from Google, which:

• Prevented successful ransomware attacks on Chromebooks. Educational and IT leaders in EMEA 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. No interviewees 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 Google 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.

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

• Improved student time on task. Students in the composite organization save 36 hours of time each year due to Chromebook’s faster boot time and 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.
  
  Leaders found that these efforts translated into greater educational outcomes for their students, such as time on task, material comprehension, and improved national rankings. Interviewees also shared that the improved student engagement led to better student attendance. Leadership attributed much of the benefit to culture and student engagement to Chromebook and Google Workspace for Education.
• Reduced teacher labor. Students were not the only ones who benefited from faster startup times and reduced update downtime. Teachers in EMEA spent less time waiting for students to have their devices ready and could instead dedicate more classroom time to instruction. In addition, tools included with Google Workspace for Education allowed them to more easily communicate and schedule with parents and guardians. 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. Assuming 75% of this time can be reallocated toward higher-value work, each teacher regains 42 hours each year.
  
   

Additional benefits of Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education in Education in EMEA. Educational leaders in EMEA mentioned other improvements they observed that could not as easily be quantified. However, these provided important benefits to their organizations and made impactful differences in the lives of students, teachers, parents, guardians, and staff.

• Grew student enrollment. Several interviewees reported that their school systems rapidly expanded. In some cases for smaller schools, enrollment doubled in size over a period of three to five years. While many factors contributed to this expansion, interviewees found that the improvements enabled by Chromebook and Google Workspace for Education were a significant contributor to their growth.
  
  The director of strategic partnerships of an EMEA K-12 school trust that had rapidly expanded in the past few years estimated that 70% of the new students who joined came because of improvements directly related to adoption of Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education.

Benefited from seamless integration between Chromebooks and Google Workspace for Education. Interviewees found that the browser-optimized ChromeOS used by Chromebooks worked especially well with Google Workspace for Education, leading to a better experience for teachers and students. This allowed school systems already using Google Workspace for Education to receive an even greater benefit than they had already achieved. Many schools also used educational learning tools available through ChromeOS to provide additional educational benefits on top of the benefits of Google Workspace for Education.

• Helped engage parents and guardians in the learning process, further improving educational outcomes. Google Workspace for Education, including Google Classroom, allowed teachers in EMEA to engage with students’ parents and guardians on a deeper level than had previously been possible. This reduced the burden on teachers to collaborate with large numbers of families, allowed greater transparency and visibility into student progress, and improved educational outcomes for students who had greater parental support than had been possible before.
  
  The director of digital teaching and learning of an EMEA K-12 school trust said: “Chromebook has given students more independence, and it’s given them the continuity between home and school that they might not have had before. They can carry home whatever they’ve been learning in class and maximize the resources they have on their Chromebook. Parents can then learn more about what their students are doing at school and have more rich conversations with their children and help them improve.”

• Allowed children with different abilities to be included. While the cost savings of reducing specialty devices has already been accounted for, more important to educational leaders was allowing students with different needs to feel included with their peers by using the same type of device. Chromebooks helped level the playing field among students by allowing for a unified platform and common experience that was still flexible enough to address a broad spectrum of needs.
  
  The director of digital teaching and learning of an EMEA K-12 school trust said: “Workspace and Chromebooks are a considerable part of our inclusivity practice. It’s about creating classroom environments that enable every child to succeed. Chromebooks and Workspace help change that culture to get every child access to all this support.”
• Improved student and faculty collaboration. Students used Google Workspace for Education to collaborate on projects and assignments, which not only led to greater depth of understanding but also allowed them to develop skills in teamwork. In addition, teachers and faculty members found that they were able to collaborate more effectively using Google Workspace for Education and saved time on their own projects.
  
  The director of digital teaching and learning of an EMEA K-12 school trust said: “The need to collaborate was key. Being able to utilize something like Google Workspace was key as well because when we first started out, everybody was working separately in their own little schools with their own servers, and nobody was able to share.”
• Reduced repair costs. Several interviewees shared that the cost to repair Chromebooks was significantly lower than legacy devices. This was attributed in part to the ease of replacing keyboards and other components as needed.
  
  A school system in EMEA was able to cut its repair costs by almost half due to Chromebook parts being less expensive than parts for legacy devices. Repair costs fell even further as IT staff needed to spend less time removing viruses from student and teacher devices. The IT manager said: “You have a lot fewer security issues on Chromebooks, and that makes a difference to repair costs. They don’t bring in a hard drive full of viruses. Most of the time, you need 5 minutes for a full reset and then you can move on.”

• Additional savings from cloud operations. Schools realized additional cost savings when they migrated from on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud. The director of strategic partnerships of an EMEA K-12 school trust said: “One of our schools had a server at the end of its life, and it would have cost an absolute fortune to find a new server if we hadn’t moved to Google Cloud. There was a huge cost savings there by moving to the cloud.”

Appendix A: Endnotes