Feb 12
2020
How Are Education’s IT Leaders Changing Their Environments For The Better?
Response from Gary Hoberman, CEO and founder, Unqork.
IT leaders are focused on technologies that are intuitive for parents and teachers to use on any device, from anywhere. New York City’s Department of Education’s new CIO Anuraag Sharma said it well: “Our classrooms must be equipped with the modern-day tools and technology our students need to succeed.”
Leveraging cloud-based platforms is key to achieving that. By far, the shift to cloud has been a huge benefit for educational institutions. According to AWS, 96% of the top research institutions use AWS in some way. This is really laying a foundation for new innovation in education
What are your greatest concerns?
Legacy code —in education and in the public sector generally—is a millstone around innovation’s neck.
Keeping existing systems running sucks up scarce IT resources, and the people who know what’s needed best—teachers and administrators—can’t help, because they can’t code.
Unqork enables institutions to leverage everything they can from existing systems, and our no-code tools puts digitization into the hands of the people who know what students and parents need.
Large school districts are especially burdened with many different disconnected systems and multiple logins for teachers, administrators and parents. This makes communications between these constituencies even harder – keeping in mind the end goal is helping students be successful.
How are you addressing the most critical problems (and what are these problems)?
Related to legacy code and also the ability to find and hire new engineers, at Unqork we are a no-code platform that allows educational institutions to build in a completely visual environment. In fact we can switch or upgrade technologies and users don’t even know it.
How do you expect work in education IT to change in the year ahead?
We’re obviously biased, but see a huge shift towards no-code systems. Beyond the massive productivity increases that just aren’t possible with code-based or low-code systems, it improves an institution’s ability to hire and leverage great IT talent.
The no-code world allows IT departments to collaborate more tightly and iteratively with those that will actually use the systems they develop and stretch their very valuable IT dollar for greater and faster results. This will continue to be a fundamental shift in IT.