Enabling Teachers to Buy Approved Classroom Resources Faster and Cheaper
Over 12,000 teachers across Nova Scotia relied on a legacy application that made it difficult to find and buy resources for their classrooms. By understanding the system and processes from end to end, we found a drop-in replacement that will empowers teachers to find what they need and increase their collective buying power.
July 7, 2025
The Nova Scotia School Book Bureau (NSSBB) is a service used by over 12,000 teachers across Nova Scotia to access books, supplies, and classroom learning resources. The digital service includes a user-facing website that helps educators browse and order approved resources and get significant bulk discounts.
The Problem
NSSBB’s educator-facing website for online ordering was created many years ago and had minimal updates over time. Educators expressed frustration with the user experience and usability, leading to adoption problems that decreased the cost effectiveness of the overall program.
Due to the age and complex integrations of the software, the Government of Nova Scotia's Department of Cyber Security and Digital Solutions flagged the application for its risk of failure. As part of our partnership to modernize their application portfolio, we rapidly assessed the system and found a viable path forward.
Difficulty using the legacy UI made it hard for teachers to find the resources they wanted.
Our Solution
Code for Canada partnered with the teams conduct an Options Analysis to explore the best path forward.
We conducted research and analysis of the sustainability of the service through the lenses of people, process, and technology,
including:
- Internal and external interviews to understand the needs and experiences of educators and staff delivering the service
- Demos of the existing website and business processes, plus document review of business procedures
- An environmental scan of possible solution approaches
After assessing whether the best path forward was Build, Partner, or Buy, our recommended approach was to buy a SaaS off-the-shelf ecommerce solution that could support the enterprise needs and team's specific workflows.
As with every project, we prototyped the solution to ensure if would work in practice.
Outcomes
We produced a prototype, evidence-based recommendation and roadmap that met user expectations and internal process requirements.
As a result, the partner was able to choose a vendor in a competitive ecosystem and implement the solution faster, with lower capital and operating costs with little to no risk of vendor lock-in.
By better support teachers needs, the solution is expected to increase usage and therefore bring down costs of classroom resources across the province.