Scotch Oakburn College innovates, educates and creates the future with Adobe

Located in Australia’s island State of Tasmania, a half-hour flight south from Melbourne in the town of Launceston, Scotch Oakburn College has been educating students from early learning through grade 12 for over 134 years. Some 1,200 students, including 80 boarders from across the nation and globe, attend its programs. The independent school is affiliated with the Uniting Church and the Round Square Association and is committed to its vision of ‘Creating the Future’ within a caring, supportive, and inclusive community.

As Scotch Oakburn pursued a 1:1 device program to issue laptops to students, it wanted to implement Adobe Acrobat Sign for electronic signatures while providing access to industry-standard creative software using Adobe Creative Cloud for education. The school pre-loads software on the laptops to make it easy for students to access apps as soon as they log in.

Busy parents, staff benefit from e-signatures

Brendan Vince, head of eLearning and IT services for Scotch Oakburn College, oversees the 1:1 device program. In advance of issuing laptops to students, Vince uses the e-signature solution to send out the requisite agreement form to parents for e-signature. “In the past you’d have to send home paperwork with kids and follow up to get it back,” he says. “With Acrobat Sign, we can send the forms directly to parents. By getting e-signatures back in minutes instead of days, we can issue laptops to students immediately, avoiding disruptions to learning and classwork.”

Scotch Oakburn looked into alternative e-signature solutions but found other options to be unaffordable. Now that it's using Adobe to digitize key document signature processes across its organization, the school saves both time and money. For example, enrollment contracts that previously were mailed with return postage paid were six times more expensive due to postage fees alone.

The school also finds that enrollment contracts no longer get lost. Marketing and community staff can have reminders sent automatically and avoid further time and costs from having to send additional envelopes. At the same time, built-in password protection helps safeguard personal information, while reducing reliance on paper supports the school’s sustainability goals.

“One of the biggest advantages really comes down to staff well-being from not having to deal with large volumes of paper,” says Vince. “Our employees really appreciate how Acrobat Sign eliminates a lot of administrative steps from their workload. They now save time previously spent tracking down busy parents and chasing signatures.”

Faster HR and hiring workflows

Scotch Oakburn’s human resources department particularly values the efficiencies of e-signatures. The small HR team processes 30 to 40 documents per month, including employment contracts for permanent and temporary staff, onboarding documentation for new hires, higher duties allowance forms when job responsibilities change, and more. With the digitization of these workflows, the team has gained better visibility over status of documents awaiting signature. They also now have a way to more conveniently store completed documents.

“Acrobat Sign has certainly assisted by streamlining our HR processes” says Michelle Franke, director People and Culture for Scotch Oakburn. “It provides better visibility when tracking the status of our documentation, and we’re now seeing faster acceptances to our offers of employment. Employees are also providing positive feedback, as it provides for an easier approach to get documents back to HR.”

In keeping with the college’s core philosophies, Scotch Oakburn students are encouraged to take part in experiential learning through academic enrichment, community service, work experiences, and other activities. For instance, when students participate in delegations traveling to international conferences, internships, or exchange programs with other institutions across Australia or overseas, the streamlined e-signature process simplifies routing forms to multiple parties, such as parents, sponsoring institutions, and workplaces. “Having the flexibility to set up documents to route for e-signature in a particular order or to be sent to all parties in parallel really helps with more complex agreements that require multiple signatures,” says Vince.

Creative Cloud apps drive student innovation

Students are the biggest beneficiaries of Scotch Oakburn’s embrace of Adobe solutions. Creative Cloud apps foster student creativity in music, art, and digital media production classes. The apps also promote innovative thinking in week-long workshops held at the grade level with themes such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEAM) challenges or entrepreneurship.

In a recent STEAM workshop, grade 10 students were tasked with developing ways of promoting safer driving behavior among young people. One student group project sought to engage peers through an educational mobile app, prototyped using Adobe XD. The students made wireframes to demonstrate the user experience, guiding young drivers on ways to reduce distracted driving and improve safety.

“Even though it was the students’ first time working with app, they found it easy to use, enabling them to create a high-quality model within a three-day time constraint,” says Vince. “Stakeholders they presented to at the end of the week were impressed with the polished look. Meanwhile, our students gained skills and confidence to apply more creative approaches to addressing issues impacting society.”