Our journey in numbers

As we enter the summer months, our hearts and minds may begin looking forward to the new academic year approaching in October. However, it’s useful to remember just how busy and transformative the past three months have been for everyone at the University in the COVID-19 pandemic environment.

The numbers below have been collected at IT Services, and they indicate how some ways we use IT systems and tools saw an unprecedented and lighting fast change. They also suggest that our collective drive to come together for teaching, learning and collaborating on a daily basis continues to live on.

The great migration
During the transition to working from home, the wider University community required set-up, training and assistance for IT systems that would enable and support them in times ahead.
	As we left workplaces, the Service Desk fielded over 1400 phone calls in a single week. This is approximately double the calls from the same week last year. During this peak, the length of average call times also doubled while they solved more complex requests.
	With access to some University IT systems requiring VPN, it was clear that significant new capacity would be required. Our Networks team was able to quickly respond, and standard usage has increased four-fold to 3500-4000 concurrent users versus 1000 prior to lockdown.
	In the first week of lockdown our Work remotely web page received over 5100 page views - providing a single point of access to information and services and helping everyone move to working remotely. Before this, the Work remotely page received an average of 120 page views each week.
	Over 570 University staff have tuned in to learn how to record lectures from their home since mid-March with a Panopto training session from the Educational Media team. Since then staff managed to record over 7400 hours of new content on the University lecture capture system.
	In the five weeks after lockdown, almost 2000 people got Nexus365 Teams training from home across 82 teacher-led IT Learning Centre sessions. Over that period the LinkedIn Learning videos about Teams were viewed over 1000 times.
	Since lockdown, 183 laptops were ordered to support UAS and GLAM staff to work at home. Eighty-nine per cent of laptops ordered have been set up and configured with 75% of these shipped to home addresses (usually within 24-48 hours of the order being delivered).

The ways we work now
As we’ve settled into being at home, it’s clear that teaching, collaborating and ‘smiles' still play a central role in our daily lives.
	In a single month recently, 61,000 hours (or 3.7 million minutes) of content was delivered to students via Panopto. That’s ten times the amount of content students downloaded in the same period last year.
	We’ve taken to meeting, collaborating and chatting almost exclusively online. The previous 2,500 users who accessed Nexus365 Teams each day before March would soon find themselves in big company. In the space of weeks, the numbers swelled to 20,000 users per day on average.
	We continue to schedule group meetings and talks to get things done. Prior to March, most of these were likely face-to-face and only 150 or so on average per day would be conducted remotely on Teams. Now we schedule 4000-5000 meetings per day on Teams.
	But we still need those important and spontaneous one-to-one conversations, and have called someone through Teams over 184,000 times since early March.
	We also need to ask colleagues or working group members for an unscheduled chat every now and then. We've made unscheduled group calls through Teams over 42,100 times since early March.
	During that time we also tapped out over 4.6 million chat messages to each other in Teams. That sparked 233,000 comment reactions including smileys, thumbs up, groans, laughs and more.

The journey still continues, so keep an eye on key pages like Working remotely and Collaborate for up-to-date links and information on how to access University systems and continue collaborating.