How Edsby uses the Microsoft Cloud to transform K-12 school districts with a comprehensive learning and analytics platform

If everyone uses different applications and platforms to communicate, how can we ensure consistent results?

Could a single, cloud-based system help us engage, unite, and empower our students, teachers & parents?

Could that system help us better utilize the data we collect every day and help us achieve efficiencies and insights?

And, if that system lives in the cloud, what about the critical security, privacy & compliance requirements unique to K-12 education?

Enter Edsby

Designed specifically for K-12, Edsby is a comprehensive learning and analytics platform. It presents educational information in engaging ways, many of which are modeled after popular social networks. Instead of sending emails to parents about lesson plans and curriculum material, teachers share the appropriate information each user seeks with a few clicks inside the closed, secure Edsby environment, where all stakeholders have their own accounts.

“As we designed Edsby, we said: let's do it social style with feeds, posts, shares, and likes, because not only is it more effective, it's fun, it's fast and it's easy.”

John Myers, President, Edsby

Social classroom

Edsby includes social networking capabilities for the classroom that enable social learning and rich collaboration amongst students and teachers. Safe, structured digital places created automatically for every course taught in a school district allow a class to interact, share and learn digital citizenship, and are ideal for flipped classrooms and blended learning.

A walled garden

All data in Edsby remains secure in a closed environment, shielded from the outside world, satisfying security requirements and compliance regulations. Data in Edsby is centrally managed and owned by the district with integration across existing SIS applications.

Millions of users

Almost two million unique users and more than 1000 schools use the Edsby platform—each securely and easily accessing the information they need. Edsby enables students to engage with curriculum material, share ideas and give and get recognition. Educators can easily distribute information about events, like upcoming assessments, and parents can track student progress.

Familiar User Interface

A secure learning hub, Edsby serves more than just curriculum. Students experience a safe social learning environment, one that can easily scale as the community grows. And parents and teachers get the transparency they seek, all in a friendly and familiar format.

“What people don't necessarily realize is that a lot of parents are now digital natives. Many of today’s parents have grown up, in fact, using things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.”

Dallas Kachan, Vice-President of Marketing, Edsby

The Hillsborough County story

As the third largest school district in Florida and the 8th largest in the US, Hillsborough County Public Schools (Hillsborough) educates 200,000 K-12 students ever year. Like many districts across North America, Hillsborough tried combining off-the-shelf solutions for gradebook and parent portal solutions, but its middle and high schools used different applications. Educators could leverage these applications to store and share student grades, but students and parents needed to install browser plug ins. There were problems with macOS vs. Windows and poor mobile support. Systems ran so slow around reporting periods that educators often had to enter grades at night in off-peak hours.

In 2013, Hillsborough issued a request for proposal for a unifying solution that could modernize the way it collected, stored, and shared data captured on student performance every day. It sought to deliver a leading-edge user experience for K-12 students, parents and teachers.

A new way forward

An RFP review process led by a committee of parents, teachers, principals, district superintendents, and IT professionals evaluated bids from 14 groups for Hillsborough’s digital transformation initiative. Edsby was selected, and, now, three years later, has emerged as the district’s most highly utilized teaching and learning application.

“On peak school days, there are over 80,000 unique students, parents, and teachers using Edsby in Hillsborough County.”

Dallas Kachan, Vice-President of Marketing, Edsby

Tasked with managing servers in on-premises datacenters, school district IT employees at one time rejected cloud architectures due to concerns about cloud security and data residency. Today, those same employees now recognize the value, reliability, and peace of mind of cloud services.

More successful students

Students achieve more when parents play active parts in their education. Hillsborough parents now rely on Edsby to receive district and school news, updates on their child’s performance, course materials, homework deadlines, test results, and even information on extracurricular activities. And users can access the system from any computer, phone, or tablet.

Azure services behind the scenes

Originally, Edsby was built on the open source LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python/ PHP). The company discovered that Azure integrates easily with a Linux based stack. 98% of the Edsby code base was moved over to Azure without any changes.

Edsby’s move to the cloud coincided with the launch of two new, state-of-the-art Microsoft datacenters in Canada and has expanded to Azure datacenters in the US. These datacenters provide hyperscale hosting power, world-class security, and disaster recovery measures. This makes it easy for Canadian partners like Edsby to scale globally and serve international markets.

Azure Tool Kit

Indeed, Azure’s comprehensive cloud management tools and security services provide Edsby with best-in-class tools. From data recovery to automated backups, Azure guarantees performance, provides easy scalability, and gives the Edsby team the flexibility to adopt new services quickly.

Edsby uses Azure’s Blob Storage to store billions of objects of any type of unstructured data (i.e. images, videos, audio files, documents etc.) cost-effectively.

Running in high availability mode, Azure SQL Database provides superior performance to Edsby’s LAMP stack. With Azure, teams can choose the type of development environment and the stack they want to run. Edsby runs on the Linux stack and on Azure SQL Database, which gives the company tremendous flexibility.

With Azure Management Tools, Edsby can launch a new locally-hosted school, district or regional Edsby system anywhere in the world there’s a Microsoft datacenter. And because Microsoft has built a global network of datacenters in 40+ countries, that opens the door to an unprecedented global opportunity.

Big benefits

Edsby is well on its way to helping school districts around the world transform the learning experience for their students, teachers, and parents with innovative new technology. And, behind the scenes, Azure continues to deliver a multitude of business benefits:

Cost effectiveness -> Azure services help Edsby reduce storage costs and allow the company to sidestep significant infrastructure investments.

Customer experience -> Reduced lead times to onboard new clients provides competitive advantage and improved customer experience.

Scalability -> Azure gives Edsby the ability to scale easily. E.g., it can “open the tap” when teachers are uploading grades for report cards.

“We’re saving teachers time and enabling them to do their job the way they're supposed to do it. What used to take hours takes seconds to accomplish with Edsby.”

John Myers, President, Edsby

One lesson learned? Work with experts.

What helped the Edsby team the most in the transition to cloud was Microsoft’s innovative technology and business partnership commitment, which proved invaluable during the migration and greatly minimized the need for additional coding.