The Power of Technology in Shaping the Future of Education

Education technology conversations tend to start with the learning platform. In practice, the institutions that run smoothly are distinguished less by which platform they chose than by how they handled two unglamorous things: admissions, and the estate underneath the teaching.

Admissions is a seasonal capacity problem

Enquiries do not arrive evenly. They arrive in a season, and they are worked by a counselling team whose size was set for the average rather than the peak. The arithmetic is straightforward and rarely done:

If a counsellor can hold a meaningful conversation with, say, twenty prospects a day, and the admissions window delivers four thousand enquiries across six weeks, the requirement is roughly seven counsellors working every working day of that window with no absence and no other duties. Any shortfall does not queue politely — enquiries age, and an aged enquiry converts far worse than a fresh one.

What follows from that:

• Speed of first response matters more than the length of it.An enquiry answered the same day is a different prospect from the same enquiry answered on Thursday.
• The system has to record why someone did not enrol, not just that they did not. Without that, next year’s campaign repeats this year’s mistakes.
• Follow-up has to survive a handover.Seasonal staff leave mid-cycle; the conversation history has to outlast them.

The estate underneath the teaching

Computer labs, teaching machines and the virtual desktops behind them share a characteristic: they are idle for long stretches and then all in use at once, on a timetable that is published months in advance. That is an unusually predictable load, and predictable load is the easiest kind to size for.

The common mistake is sizing for the average and discovering the peak during the first practical of term. The timetable is the capacity plan; it just has to be read as one.

The related question is what happens when a machine in a lab fails mid-session. A spare device on site turns that into a two-minute interruption. A support ticket turns it into a lost session for one student and a distracted one for the tutor.

What actually needs measuring

• Time from enquiry to first substantive response, in hours rather than days.
• Enquiry-to-enrolment conversion, split by source, so spend can follow what works.
• Peak concurrent usage of teaching systems against capacity, taken from the timetable rather than from last term’s average.
• Unplanned interruptions to scheduled sessions — the number that tells you whether the estate is adequate.

We build lead management software used for admissions pipelines, and run managed infrastructure for teaching estates. If your admissions season is about to start, the capacity arithmetic is worth doing before it does.