🛠️ Automating SLS: Adding Teachers-as-Students with Playwright

 

🛠️ Automating SLS: Adding Teachers-as-Students with Playwright

https://youtu.be/oqN-SS9yEl0

The Challenge

In SLS, adding a colleague (teacher) as a student in a Class Group requires multiple manual steps:

1. Navigate to Class Groups → Admin → View & Edit → Students tab

2. Click Add Student, choose “Teacher as Student”

3. Search and select colleagues (potentially from different schools)

4. Click Save
   Each teacher takes 30–60 seconds to add—and scales poorly when onboarding for workshops, pilots, or department-wide tests. 

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🤖 The Playwright Hack

To reduce this pain, I built a Playwright RPA script that:

• Reads data.csv (list of teacher IDs/emails)

• Launches a browser and prompts for manual login

• Navigates to the Admin → Students tab

• Automates clicks on “Add Student → Teacher as Student”

• Searches, checks, and confirms each teacher

• Saves the group automatically

• Logs any missing or duplicate entries

This stripped hours of repetitive work into a single click.

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💡 Why It Matters

• Mass Onboarding: Add dozens of teachers in under a minute

• Accuracy: Reduces manual error—no typos or missed checkboxes

• Feedback for SLS Team: Demonstrates clear demand for a bulk-add feature

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🚀 Impact Snapshot

Before	After
30–60 s per teacher	~~1 minute total
Multiple manual steps	Fully automated
Prone to human error	Consistent and auditable logs

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🧪 Testing & Feedback

Over a recent pilot, our RPA bot loaded three class groups with 80 teachers in under 4 minutes. Based on feedback from workshop leads and admins, it’s clear a native bulk-add option would hugely benefit SLS users.

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🔭 What's Next

• Share findings with the SLS product team

• Gather usage statistics and error logs to support a feature request

• Explore expanding the tool to handle bulk student edits, class copying, and more

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📥 Try It Yourself

The Playwright executable and data.csv template (for Windows, Mac, Linux) are on GitHub: 

https://github.com/lookang/playWright/tree/main/SLS-classAddTeachersasStudents-Playwright-Automation

SLS-playwright-automation for “Add Teachers as Students” 

Reference:

1. https://www.learning.moe.edu.sg/teacher-user-guide/organise/add-teachers-as-students-to-a-class-group/ 
2. https://playwright.dev/docs/intro 
3. https://github.com/lookang/playWright/tree/main/SLS-classAddTeachersasStudents-Playwright-Automation

🧠 Strategic Alignment with ETD’s EdTech Masterplan

🎯 1. Removing Pain Points Through Prototyping

This Playwright automation is not just a clever hack—it’s a low-code, rapid prototype to explore a real workflow challenge teachers face: manually adding colleagues as students for lesson previews, team teaching, or PD purposes.

By automating this, we are:

• Testing real-world friction in the SLS ecosystem.

• Gathering evidence to prioritize native feature development in SLS.

🔗 ETD Alignment:

Supports Goal 2 of the EdTech Plan — “Ensure an intuitive, seamless experience for teachers” through user-driven enhancements.

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🧪 2. Evidence-Informed Innovation

Rather than waiting for long dev cycles, this experiment provides:

• Data from actual use cases

• Insights from school clusters trying out SLS module previews or collaborative authoring

• A testbed for validating if it's worth building as a full SLS feature

🔗 ETD Alignment:

Reflects the spirit of “Agile Piloting” and “Fail Fast, Learn Fast” in EdTech R&D.

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💡 3. Empowering Teacher-Innovators

This effort is a grassroots-led innovation where teacher-developers and HQ EdTech officers co-create tools that solve daily classroom challenges.

This:

• Demonstrates ownership of digital solutions

• Cultivates a culture of “Educator as Designer”

• Encourages experimentation with safe automation tools like Playwright, Puppeteer, and TagUI.

🔗 ETD Alignment:

Supports Goal 3 — “Equip teachers with advanced EdTech skills and mindsets.”

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🌐 4. Contributing to SLS Ecosystem Enhancements

This automation could inform:

• Future UI/UX changes in class group management

• Role-switching flexibility for co-teaching, SLS lesson design, and onboarding

• A possible API endpoint or shortcut for teachers in SLS-Next

🔗 ETD Alignment:

Contributes toward “Smart Platform Features” under SLS 2.0 roadmap.

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✅ Conclusion

This hack proves that teachers need a bulk “Teacher as Student” feature in SLS—saving time, reducing errors, and supporting meaningful testing and collaboration. With product guidance, this could be a valuable native tool in future SLS releases.