Education

Noggin's OCA solutions can assist State or Federal education departments, tertiary institutions (universities, TAFEs, colleges) and secondary schools with the following types of incidents or uses:

Critical infrastructure protection
Educational assets affected by major hazards.
Crisis communication to students, parents and teachers
Minor incident reporting, response and recovery
Security, safety and health incidents

OCA supports:

Use	Description
Crisis Management	Effective and timely communication to the right people is important in normal business operations; in a crisis situation it is critical. The ability to get key messages out to students, staff and other stakeholders, monitor feedback and other media, and keep decision-makers informed is vital to minimise the negative impacts from a crisis or major incident, whether they be financial, operational or reputational. Noggin's OCA product series provides a way for crisis managers to communicate quickly to the right people over the best media, and at the press of a button. It can automate responses, communications and processes to ensure that the right actions are taken, communication lines remain open, stakeholders are kept informed and decision-makers have the right information when they need it.
Alerting	With OCA you can send and receive information via email, SMS, fax, voice and XML. Send out warnings, co-ordinate evacuations, keep staff and students informed, and use the workflow tools to automate communications procedures. You can also send messages from a single source to multiple media, including public websites, intranets, and social media tools.
Natural hazards - response & recovery	Educational institutions can be impacted by major natural hazards: floods, bushfires, cyclones and other extreme weather events. As an educational facility, you may need to inform staff and students to avoid areas of campus or campus altogether, reschedule class schedules, arrange for engineering and emergency response teams to deal with the impact of hazards on educational infrastructure. The OCA can assist in planning and response for such incidents including co-ordination of shared resources with other agencies via the OCA Connect interoperability tool.
Security	Security is a big issue for educational facilities, and some of the factors that make it so is that educational structures are generally spread out, have lots of people passing through them, have valuable assets in them, and are closed for business for large periods of time. And yes, there is the odd student prankster causing a security upset, or a protest, civil disturbance of some kind. OCA can consume alarms and other data from a wide variety of third party systems, and escalate automatically when key conditions are met. Not only can OCA notify key stakeholders immediately, but it can task people and automate standard operating procedures, ensuring that the correct protocols are followed and delays minimised.
Monitor educational infrastructure from a strategic point of view	Educational infrastructure can be centralised or widely spread out. Some educational facilities may even be in third party institutions such as teaching hospitals or commercial training facilities. The type and variety of assets varies from scientific labs to libraries and canteen facilities. The turnover of human traffic going through educational infrastructure is enormous. OCA allows you to map out your critical infrastructure at any level of detail, track dependencies and stakeholder information, and manage site appointments and response plans. With rich media integration such as CCTV feeds, images, video or alert triggers, it provides all the information you need in a central place - giving you a total operational picture to monitor your infrastructure and respond to risks.
Get mobile	Educational infrastructure can be very spread out and your incident response team may often be working off site. The OCA is optimised for delivery across multiple mobile devices, including Blackberries, iPhones, Android phones as well as a variety of tablet devices. Whilst OCA is good at distributing information, it can also consume information from external information sources whether they are GIS tracking systems, tracking resources or personnel, or alarm triggers from security systems. OCA allows you bring multiple sources together, and access that information in real time - in the field. Often an incident will affect a geographical area, or multiple areas. OCA's geospatial tools allow you to plot affected areas and send communications to key stakeholders in those areas. Using the asset tool you can reach key workers in a targeted and sophisticated manner. You can also use OCA to quickly identify assets and people within a geographical area, or mark-up an incident map for sharing with other stakeholders.
Flexible incident recording	Those responsible for managing incidents across an educational group may be providing those services to a wide variety of different situations. Security incidents, civil disturbances, hazardous material spills in laboratories, injuries in medical training facilities, sporting injuries, OHS&E incidents. Standard operating procedures for dealing with different types of incidents can vary widely. The OCA is built to handle a diversity of types of incidents that can happen at an educational facility.
Case management	Incidents on campus have the ability to affect a range of people, particularly public health events. An outbreak of cryptosporidiosis at the institution's pool. A foreign student brings a virus back to school after a break overseas. An outbreak of measles or even whooping cough. Educational institutions may play a first responder type of role in identifying public health issues and working with public health authorities to monitor cases. The OCA Connect interoperability tool allows you to share information with other trusted sources and partners in the public health realm.
Mobilise resources	OCA's resource management tools can provide tactical and strategic mobilisation and tracking of resources in response to incidents. Human resource and asset resource information can be integrated with third party software systems, and capabilities to deal with incidents can be assessed on the fly. The OCA asset and tasking modules can be used to allocate any resources to incidents or tasks, be they human, fixed, mobile, vehicles or equipment. Tasking can be internal as well as external, with requests to third party agencies monitored in real-time via OCA Connect. Resources can be located and allocated geographically, by availability, by capability, by type, or by cost. You can also track costs against resource requests or allocations, to easily manage the overall cost of a response or recovery effort. OCA's simple data management tools allow you to create new asset categories on the fly.
Information security	The security of data in the educational sector is extremely important. The privacy compliance obligations around student and staff information are stringent. Infrastructure may have classified information. The recent investigation by the NSW Privacy Commissioner into Sydney University's data breach has highlighted a need for more stringent security around educational sector data. The OCA Incident Manager is the only incident management product in the world to be certified by the Defence Signals Directorate, to the internationally recognised Common Criteria EAL2+ security rating - (ISO/IEC 15408). Our multi-node cloud software offering is hosted by Fujitsu, with data centres that meet the stringent ASIO T4 and ISO27001 standards. You can also host the application yourself, and we have experience in setting up hardware in classified environments. Key staff also has clearance to the appropriate levels. If security of data matters to you, then you can't do better than OCA.
Executive reporting	Whether it's to a Minister of Education, a vice chancellor or principal, or a board of governance, timely and accurate reporting is critical for effective decision-making. OCA combines all available information about incidents, and provides real-time views of situations to decision-makers. Different functional roles can have different views of the same information. Senior personnel may only have access to information at a high level where they need to make high level decisions. Those at an operational level may see more detail and use the information in the system in a more business-as-usual context.