The Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) modernizes education, collaboration, and telecommunication services with Microsoft solutions

The IPN is a public educational institution in Mexico, considered the second most important in the country. Its educational offerings include Higher Middle Education, Higher Education, Research, and Postgraduate. It currently has 212,000 students, 90 units in 24 states, and 16,000 academics.  

While the COVID-19 pandemic was unleashed in early 2020, the IPN identified the need to standardize its educational platform so that students, teachers, and officials could use the same tools and have all the information gathered in one place. Before that, each professor used technology of their choice to teach classes, which could lead to legal issues and inconsistencies among various educational subjects and programs in the future. 

A safe, quality education 

To standardize its structure, the institution, already in a long relationship with Microsoft, after a deep feasibility and cost-benefit analysis, chose the Microsoft 365 suite as its collaboration and productivity platform by individually providing 100 GB of email storage, 5 TB on OneDrive, and the ability to conduct live events virtually for up to 20,000 people. Carlos Ruiz Viquez, General Coordinator of the National Calculation Center, and responsible for all the information technologies and telecommunications of the IPN, states that they decided to adopt these tools from Microsoft so that students could begin to have experience in solutions used by large, world-class companies. “Being public education, we have a social sense that is marked by our own origins,” said Ruiz Viquez. “Our primary focus is on making the country’s most vulnerable groups achieve true democratization of education. We knew that with this suite we would be bringing world-class technology to disadvantaged social classes for free.” 

In this way, Office 365 Pro Plus was enabled for the more than 228,000 members of the educational community and customized trainings were conducted for teachers, administrators, and students to encourage and enhance their use. However, due to the pandemic, challenges became even more complicated. “We began to notice that as the number of users and digital services grew, so did the number of cyberattacks. There were threats and attempts at extortion and phishing,” Ruiz Viquez says. “We had a very basic and narrow security solution that only protected us from viruses, and not broadly.” 

Therefore, the IPN decided to extend its licenses from Microsoft 365 A3 to Microsoft 365 A5, which includes Power BI, Phone System, and Microsoft’s complete suite of advanced and intelligent security, advanced compliance, and automated vulnerability analysis systems. “This tool is able to detect emails when the address is unreliable and determines which email sources are not to be received,” explains Ruiz Viquez. The solution ensures protection across all collaboration tools, identity, devices, and apps, delivering a wide range of world-class telecom, security, and advanced data analytics capabilities. 

Today, Mexico’s IPN is one of the largest educational institutions in the country, and thanks to its technological solutions and quality of academic programs, it’s also one of the most prominent in Latin America. 

Digital intake screening for more than 110,000 online applicants 

Until 2021, the Institute’s admission process was conducted in person. Since the IPN serves everyone regardless of their socioeconomic level, the applicants traveling to the institution caused them to spend a significant amount of money. It also meant a high cost for printing, paper, supervisors, proctors, rental of specific places to carry out the examination, complex logistics, and many other associated costs, which represented an excess in the public budget. 

In light of this situation, the IPN decided to adopt a platform supported by Azure Cognitive Services, Azure AI, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Load Balancer, and Azure big data services to offer, for the first time in its history, the ability to take the exam remotely. “Thanks to the online entry test, an 18% increase in the number of applicants was seen,” says Ruiz Viquez. In addition, the following benefits were observed:  

• 40% increase in the number of applicants registered for the exam 
• 18% increase in the number of applicants who submitted an admission exam 
• Reduced test application time to just 3 hours 
• Reduced effort for scoring and delivering results by more than 2,000 working hours 
• Savings of more than 35 tons of paper 
• Reduced carbon footprint  
• Increased scope of geographic locations of applicants 
• Savings of 2 working weeks for the site assignment process 
• Pay savings to more than 3,000 unionized people who supported the application of the admissions exam 
• Savings of more than $14 million pesos to take the exam 
• Equilibrium point reached for the first time (i.e., there was no deficit to carry out the admission examination) 
• 20% increase in resource uptake for the completion of the admission examination 
• More than 40,000 concurrent applicants in a single shift taking the intake exam distributed in Microsoft data centers around the world 
• Unprecedented use of Azure Cognitive Services and Azure AI 
• Use of highly available infrastructure, with the detection and rejection of attacks and unauthorized connections 

In addition, the test results were always published online. Ruiz Viquez reports that the entire website was under an on-premises architecture. “It worked well most of the year, but when we published the intake results, we had high demand that caused crashes on the website.” As a result, they migrated the website to Azure, and thanks to the Azure App Services, they gained flexibility, automatic scaling, and assurance that the website could withstand high demand and user spikes by querying their results seamlessly. “For the first time in many years, our website did not ‘crash,’ which meant that there were no complaints or criticisms, minimizing any risk or questions therein,” adds Ruiz Viquez. 

Technological innovation in education 

The adoption of technology by the IPN has led to more than 200,000 students learning more creatively today under an inverted classroom model via online academic content. Now the IPN community is connected much better and can communicate more easily, with high-quality services and technologies possessed by only the largest universities in the world, and with the highest security standards. In turn, collaboration tools give the entire educational community the ability to be more productive – they can easily work together and find everything they need in one space. Teachers now have access to many solutions within Microsoft Teams to customize their workspace and adapt tools to empower their students' learning. 

On the other hand, it should be noted that the IPN participates in the “Innovation” program, a Microsoft program for all public universities in the country focused on training young Mexicans in modern technologies, such as solution architecture, data engineering, and artificial intelligence. In the 2021 edition of this program, there were a total of 9,900 participants, of which 875 achieved Microsoft certification in advanced AZ 900 Azure Fundamentals technologies, thus making it the higher education institute with the largest number of certifications in the country. 

For Ruiz Viquez, the pandemic advanced the future. “Now we are facing a key concept that is the inverted classroom. It is no longer a traditional boring or hybrid class. Instead, quality digital content is uploaded to an online platform and consumed by the student asynchronously and on-demand at the time they consider it, and then they go to the in-person class just to resolve questions,” he says.  

Rethinking the teaching model 

The IPN believes that technology is key to its future. In a short time, it will be adopting Power BI, a solution that turns unrelated data into consistent, interactive information, so that the institution’s officials can get reports and be able to make better decisions. It will also modernize voice and telephone services via Phone System; with this service, all users with a telephone line will be able to communicate through Teams from any device, increasing their efficiency and productivity.  

The IPN will also implement electronic boards to eliminate the need for students to keep notes. “You have to rethink the teaching model based on repetition and memory. We need to show students how to use technology to best educate them and be more proactive,” says Ruiz Viquez. “We need the technology to be very present at the Institute so that students learn better.”