The Department for Education of South Australia Protects Students Online with AI-Powered Saasyan Platform on AWS

Saasyan, an AWS Partner based in Australia, worked with the Department for Education of South Australia to implement an AI-powered solution on AWS to centralize management, better protect students online, and prepare schools for online testing. The department deployed the Saasyan online student safety platform, which runs on Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS.

The Department for Education provides educational instruction to nearly 200,000 students at more than 800 schools across South Australia. The department’s more than 14,000 teachers and support staff provide a range of integrated education, training, and child development services that benefit children, young people, and families.

The department’s ICT team, which administers and maintains the technology platforms used in all South Australia government schools, lacked centralized tools that could provide better visibility into operations. “Most of the schools were disconnected from the department which subsequently meant they managed their own IT environments. And without central visibility, we couldn’t drive technology standardization, nor could we drive systemic value,” says Dan Hughes, chief information officer at the department. As part of the drive for centralization, ICT needed to track and monitor school networks to better protect students. “We needed a way to monitor web searches, videos, email, and chat so schools could keep students safe online,” Hughes says.

Additionally, because Australia was increasingly mandating online state and national testing, the department sought to improve overall connectivity by implementing high-speed internet in all schools. “Only 7 percent of our schools had enterprise-grade internet, and we also had a lot of regional connectivity issues,” says Hughes. “We needed to make sure every student in every school in the state had access to quality digital technologies.”

Following an evaluation period, the department established a consortium of companies including Australian telecommunication and technology company Telstra and AWS Partner Saasyan. Saasyan, an AI-powered online student safety technology company, provides an Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based platform that gives schools flexible cybersecurity controls and advanced alerting and reporting of student online activities.

Using AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), the Saasyan platform analyzes over 100,000 messages and logs per second. Saasyan monitors and analyzes web searches, website visits, videos, chat, email, images, and documents. “Our mission is to enable schools to detect and intervene when it comes to students’ safety and well-being concerns such as cyberbullying, self-harm, threats of violence, online grooming, and image-based abuse,” says Sidney Minassian, chief executive officer at Saasyan.

The department began by implementing high-speed internet to the majority of its schools. In the second phase, Saasyan worked closely with the department to deploy the Saasyan platform. “The iterative implementation approach was beneficial because it meant we could start small, gain confidence in Saasyan, and see the product evolve throughout the process,” says Hughes. “That gave us a high level of confidence that Saasyan was fully committed and also willing to learn and pivot throughout the implementation process.”

With Saasyan and AWS, the department has a centralized view into IT operations at each school and preschool. As a result, the department can now provide central technical and application support to schools through a managed service model. “Some larger schools employ their own ICT resources. We delegate permissions to the centrally managed tools, meaning all ICT stakeholders have the ability to manage schools more confidently and consistently,” says Hughes. “Also, we have much better visibility into network bandwidth performance for each school, so we can drill down and see exactly what is being consumed. Before, schools would complain about the internet being slow, but now we can pinpoint the precise reasons for that, such as too many students browsing or streaming video applications at the same time.”

The department’s improved visibility is also helping schools protect students. Specifically, the Saasyan management dashboard provides a complete view of students’ online behavior through drill-down access and web controls that are configurable by grade level. Additionally, the solution’s reporting and alerting enables schools to act before a welfare incident occurs. “We previously had no view into student well-being. We have that now,” says Hughes. “This is one of the major benefits of the Saasyan platform on AWS. Its focus on students and education is really powerful.”

Because of its new high-speed internet capabilities, the department has greatly improved overall connectivity in all schools. “For the first time, all our teachers are confident they can run digital platforms and move seamlessly and safely to online learning and testing,” says Hughes. “Also, we know that we can monitor the online testing process easily for each school because of the Saasyan solution we have in place.”

Saasyan and the department are now working to enhance existing functionality by adding more AI technologies. “Our partnership with Saasyan will continue as we start driving the benefits around using AI as a mechanism for early intervention. We’ll be exploring some pretty powerful things together,” Hughes concludes. “It’s rare to find a provider committed to driving technology outcomes that best benefit the students and teachers we serve across South Australia. Saasyan has gone above and beyond what we expected.”