The Intelligent Campus

Today’s educational institutions need to evolve to meet the growing needs of students around the world.

To truly empower and engage students, there must be a transformation of legacy networks into agile, secure service platforms that are accessible to everybody.

Research carried out by Forbes suggests that more than a quarter of a billion students will enrol onto university courses across the globe by 2025. Such vast figures prioritise the need to deliver a connected & intelligent campus for all.  In order to effectively accommodate not just the volume of students on campus, but their unique and growing needs, learning institutions, by necessity must evolve and change. In short, higher education administrators and leaders must strive to achieve a “Connected Campus”.

There are 4 main points to consider when delivering an intelligent campus to students and staff:

• Security

A top priority for educational institutions has to be how secure the systems provided are. Reducing the risk of cyber threats and information security are cited by many sources as the number one technology issue facing the industry. Data and information systems are central to learning, teaching and administrative functions.

• Student Experience

Student satisfaction is crucial to engagement and retention. In the UK, a 1% shift in an NSS overall score can move an institution up to 17 places higher in the table.  Many educational organisations are faced with the unavoidable fact that the digital campus is becoming a fundamental part of student life. Student portal software can help organisations to join up disparate systems into one convenient place for users, on any device.

• Joining disparate systems

Implementing a digital campus helps to bring together existing systems which have been disparate in delivering campus services and deliver them via one single log-in (no need for multiple passwords) to a student’s smartphone or tablet computer making them work harder and smarter and eliminating the cost of rip and replace.

• Collaboration

As well as systems being disparate, sectors or teams within your institution can also be seen to be the same. To build an intelligent and connected campus, it is imperative for everybody to be working towards a common goal. Bringing ideas together, as well as data sets will vastly improve performance.

Collaboration speeds things up. It fast-tracks progress. A problem that may take months to get resolved when handled by a single sector of an institution, may take just a few hours to resolve when everybody comes together to employ their unique standpoints and expertise. Teamwork opens up multiple ideas and solutions that a single individual may not be able to produce.

Almost instantly, services across the campus become joined up, easily accessible and portable – students can carry their learning around on their smartphone in their pocket. Systems that were underutilised take on new life, and from needing to replace existing IT you gain the ability to build on it and create something much greater. Add on a number of apps to deliver campus maps, menus for campus eateries or just about anything else that students may demand!

Would you like to discuss the benefits of implementing a digital campus?