tech check: the tools and platforms powering online learning at aelo swiss academy

I look after the digital side of teaching at AELO Swiss Academy, which means I spend a surprising amount of time thinking about plumbing. Not the kind in walls, but the kind in lesson plans: where the files live, which button a student presses at 07:55, what happens when the connection drops mid-sentence. Twice a year, the teaching team and I sit down and audit every tool we run. Some survive. Many do not.

What follows is our current stack, the reasoning behind each choice, and a fair account of the things we tried and dropped. None of it is exotic. The interesting part, if there is one, is how few tools we actually need when the pieces fit together properly.

how we choose, and what we optimise for

Every tool at the academy has to pass a simple test: it must replace something worse, not merely arrive as something new. A glittering feature means little if it adds a login, an outage risk, and an hour of training for every teacher who touches it. Each platform we adopt is another password to reset, another vendor to invoice, another place where a lesson can quietly break.

We also weigh data protection heavily. Switzerland's revised federal data protection law has been in force since September 2023, and it sharpened our thinking about where student data sits. Our working rule is that anything holding personal information should keep that data in European data centres, and we check this during procurement rather than assuming it. Vendors are usually upfront about it once you ask. The ones that hedge are telling you something.

The last criterion is teacher workload. A platform that saves students ten minutes but costs teachers thirty is a net loss, because teacher time is the scarcest resource we have. We learned this the slow way, through a few purchases I am not proud of.

the backbone: a learning platform that stays out of the way

At the centre sits Moodle, self-hosted with a European provider. It is open source, mature, associate degree aviation and entirely unglamorous, which is roughly why we chose it. Every class has a single course page organised by week: materials at the top, the assignment in the middle, the deadline clearly marked. Students always know where to look, and parents can be given a view of it without a separate portal.

The trade-offs are real. Moodle's default interface is busy, so we stripped it down and built templates that teachers fill in rather than design from scratch. That took a term of patient work with a handful of early adopters before the rest of the staff came across willingly. Self-hosting also means we own the update cycle, which is a benefit and a burden. Updates land on our schedule, but they land on our desk too. I have learned to schedule them for Wednesday afternoons, never Fridays.

What sold the teachers, eventually, was the gradebook. One place, consistent across subjects, no spreadsheet reconciliation at report time. A biology teacher told me she got a weekend back. That is the kind of endorsement no feature list can buy.

live lessons: video, latency, and the human voice

For scheduled lessons we use Zoom, with data routing set to European data centres. Breakout rooms carry most of the pedagogical weight: three or four students per room, a task on the shared whiteboard, and the teacher moving between rooms the way one would move between tables in a physical classroom. Waiting rooms and per-lesson links keep the security side quiet and boring, which is exactly what we want it to be.

Latency is the constraint nobody warns you about. A student joining from Southeast Asia or South America faces a round trip to European servers of somewhere between 150 and 300 milliseconds. It sounds tiny. In conversation, it means people talk over each other constantly, because nobody hears an interruption in time to stop. Rather than fight it, we built norms around it: a brief pause before responding, a raised-hand convention for longer discussions, and a habit of finishing sentences fully before anyone else starts. It took a few weeks to feel natural. Now it mostly does.

Recordings are part of the promise, not an afterthought. Every live lesson is recorded with consent, posted to the course page within the hour, and given chapter markers so a student can jump straight to the worked example without scrubbing through forty minutes of discussion. Captions are switched on by default. They exist primarily for accessibility, but our teachers use the transcripts for revision notes more than anyone.

The fallback matters more than the feature list. If video fails, the lesson continues as audio plus the shared whiteboard. If bandwidth collapses entirely, a phone audio option keeps a voice in the room. Last winter, during a storm that knocked out power in one student's neighbourhood, a girl presented her chemistry results from a mobile phone, screen off, voice only, while her classmates followed the numbers on the whiteboard. Nobody in the room suggested she had missed the lesson. She hadn't.

documents, folders, and where the work actually lives

Written work lives in Google Workspace for Education, with storage pinned to European regions. Shared drives replace email attachments entirely: one drive per department, one folder per class, a naming convention short enough that people actually follow it. The single calendar sits underneath everything, so a deadline entered once appears where it should and nowhere else.

The quiet advantage of a single suite is version history. When a student loses a paragraph to a sync error at 22:00, we recover it in two minutes. When a teacher wants to see how a draft became a final essay, the history shows the process without any extra record-keeping. Commenting inside documents has also become our main feedback channel, and it reads more like a conversation than the traditional margin scribble ever did.

The cost is notification fatigue. Out of the box, these tools are engineered to interrupt, so we turn almost all of it off. Sharing settings are the one thing we audit carefully each term, because a folder set to "anyone with the link" is a small data incident waiting for a convenient moment.

assessment without surveillance

We looked hard at lockdown proctoring software and stepped back. It asks for webcam access to a student's bedroom, flags ordinary behaviour as suspicious, and frames every exam as an interrogation. Whatever it prevents, it costs more in atmosphere and trust than it returns. At our size, trust scales better than surveillance.

So assessment is designed open instead. Quizzes in the LMS draw from randomised question pools, so two students rarely see the same paper, and they are built open-book by design. If a student can look something up in thirty seconds, the question was not worth asking. We write questions that ask for reasoning, comparisons, and worked thinking, and we accept that some answers will be findable online. The reasoning is what gets graded.

For longer written work in the oldest cohorts, we use a plagiarism check sparingly, and never as an accusation. It opens a conversation, not a case file. More often, verification comes from a five-minute oral follow-up over video: ask a student to explain one paragraph in their own words and you learn very quickly whose work it is. Teachers were sceptical of the time cost until they tried it. It takes less time than reading the same essay twice.

the small tools that carry a surprising load

A shared whiteboard, Miro on its education plan, does more daily work than almost anything else we run. Mathematics and science depend on it: a problem written live, a diagram annotated by four hands at once, the finished board exported straight into the course page. An inexpensive document camera sits beside it, because there is still no substitute for watching a teacher's hand work through long division or a titration in real time.

Short recorded explanations have become a genre of their own. Five to eight minutes, made with the recorder built into the operating system, posted with a title that says exactly what it covers. Teachers initially thought they needed studio production. They learned, as everyone does, that clarity beats polish, and that a recording made at 21:00 for one confused student often helps thirty others who never asked.

Scheduling runs on booking links tied to the shared calendar, which quietly solved a problem that used to consume whole email threads: parent meetings across time zones. And the school chat operates under one firm rule, set in writing and modelled from the top: no reply is expected after 19:00 in the recipient's local time. The tools should not follow anyone home.

when students are eight time zones away

Because our students join from several continents, the asynchronous spine of a course matters more than any single app. Our standard is that every live lesson produces three things: a recording, a short written summary, and a task with a generous window. A student who slept through the live session because it aired at midnight her time should lose nothing but the discussion, and we schedule two overlap windows each week for exactly that, so no student is permanently stuck with the midnight slot.

Deadlines follow the student's local day, not Zurich's. It sounds like a small courtesy. In practice it removes the most common source of stress in our student feedback, and it costs the timetable nothing.

what we retired, and why

Consolidation is a feature, so it is worth recording the casualties. A standalone quiz app went first; it duplicated what the LMS already did, and students kept forgetting its login between uses. A beautifully designed e-portfolio followed; parents found it confusing, teachers found it duplicative, and a plainly structured shared folder did the same job with none of the friction. The third casualty stung a little: a second video platform bought in a hurry during the pandemic surge, whose seat licences sat mostly unused while everyone defaulted to the platform they already knew. We kept one platform, plus the audio fallback, and redirected the budget to teacher training instead.

The pattern across all three is the same. Tools fail not because they are bad but because they overlap with something already working, and overlap divides attention.

the pre-term tech check

Twice a year, before each term and again after any major platform update, we run a fifteen-minute ritual that has done more for our reliability than any purchase. Every student, and every teacher in August, works through the same short check:

• camera and microphone tested on the device they will actually use
• connection speed measured against a modest minimum, not a marketing number
• a live login to each of the three core platforms, not remembered ones
• headphones checked, since built-in microphones cause most of our audio complaints
• a written fallback plan: what to do in the first five minutes if something fails

Before we made this routine, the first week of term produced a steady trickle of support calls, a dozen or more each September. Now it is typically two or three, and they are the interesting kind, the ones worth having.

people before platforms

Support is deliberately unglamorous: one help channel, a human answering within one school day, and short recorded walkthroughs instead of day-long workshops. Nobody remembers a workshop. Everybody rewatch a three-minute clip the night before their first parent meeting.

The honest conclusion of several years of this work is that no platform on our list has ever taught anyone anything. Moodle does not teach chemistry. Zoom does not teach discussion. The tools are plumbing, and their job is to stay quiet so that teaching gets loud. When the plumbing works, nobody notices it, which is the only review that matters.

We re-audit the whole stack again in spring. Some of what I have described here will be gone by then, replaced by something simpler, and I will not mourn it. The stack changes slowly at AELO Swiss Academy, and slowly on purpose, because the point of a tech check is not to chase what is new. It is to make sure that when a student opens her laptop at seven in the morning, eight time zones away, everything simply works.