Higher education stakeholders expect:
From the campus coffee shop to the library, and everywhere in-between, higher education institutions can streamline student experiences by providing personalized, application-based "way-finding." Enable students to get to lectures on-time and find spaces to study or collaborate with ease, through services like automatic notifications of classroom location changes or detailed directions to get from one class to the next.
Students on both the physical and virtual campus value services that make their lives easier. Applications enable administrators to push campus alerts, notify students about events, monitor student health, or deploy contact tracing. For visitors to the physical campus, institutions can use dynamic signage and context-aware experiences to engage visitors on their mobile devices.
Start building mobile experiences
Students need access to the right spaces and learning formats—whether they are 1:1, team-based, lecture hall, projects, or experiential—to suit their learning needs. As institutions transition to hybrid learning, students are gaining jurisdiction over their time, place, path, and pace of study. For campus management and IT, a key objective is to maintain continuity, and facilitate consistent access to resources—no matter where the learner is located. Colleges are making classes more feasible for students from diverse geographic and economic backgrounds by supporting flexible schedules with the potential to stagger work and learning hours.
Hybrid learning environments are giving learners and educators increased flexibility. Today, professors can plan and teach courses with the same flexibility students have in consuming education. Professors can experiment to continuously develop teaching and learning environments, create new ways to engage with students, and provide innovative learning experiences. Educators can report to work and collaborate with fellow educators, administrators, and researchers from anywhere, any time. The end-goal: a seamless transition between online and on-campus learning environments.
Administrative and faculty teams are assembling, meeting, sharing, and collaborating flexibly across organizational and geographic boundaries – both in real-time and outside scheduled meetings. While remote work isn’t a new phenomenon in higher education, we realize today that work is an activity, not a place. Remote work can increase productivity, lower physical infrastructure costs, and decrease the overall burden of change management.
Institutions benefit from these spaces with the ability to improve capacity planning, show how many people attend lectures, and use predictive analytics to help people find the right space for their needs. Thus, the university can scale up or down based on capacity needs.
Empower remote work
Institutions have long emphasized student success and engagement. Today, there is more opportunity than ever before to use data-driven means to improve student experiences, track student progress, and measure student success.
Associations, memberships, clubs and communities are an important part of campus life. Whether digital or in-person, maintaining these engagements is critical to student experience. Now, more than ever, institutions need to provide safe engagements for everyone on campus. Alerts driven by contextual information and environmental monitoring can support both student safety and engaging experiences. The right technology also allows institutions to measure dynamic, real-time issues like air quality and spatial requirements.
Understanding behavior allows for better experiences. Contextual information from online and in-person behavior enables universities to adjust to changing technology needs. By triggering dynamic engagements, the university can provide a personalized and optimized in-person experience, including providing wireless access, sharing information with faculty and students based on real-time events, and understanding behavior patterns to improve experiences.
Engage your students
According to Educause, 96% of students say that access to Wi-Fi is the most important technology they need to study. Solutions like Cisco’s User Defined Network, universities enable continuous and integrated student wireless experiences. For guests, rapid on-boarding and resource provision makes it easier effectively navigate an unfamiliar campus environment.
Build campus connectivity
High-performance computing offers researchers the ability to plug-and-play specialized systems and equipment into the network and transfer large quantities of data between the network and resources—such as servers hosting data sets for AI and Machine Learning. It also enables access to externally-hosted digital resources—often cloud-based reference datasets and processing services. As research continues to transform, universities designed with a hybrid approach empower innovation and attract an even more competitive student pool by providing flexible experiences to work and research from anywhere.
In research, security is paramount, particularly as research increasingly takes place in a hybrid or remote environment. Isolate threats with ease and control integration in a low-tolerance environment. Collaboration tools can help researchers to foment commercial ventures, monetize research, and share information on a global scale, while enabling them to continue critical research - no matter what is happening in the world.
Enable remote research and collaboration
In the Fall 2020 semester, Educause reports that only 15% of respondents prioritized building automation, and 10% prioritized energy consumption automation. Tomorrow's smart campus will be designed to enable condition-based maintenance and replenishment through alerts and automated requests based on sensory and historical data.
Sensors facilitate asset tracking—whether those assets are fixed or portable—including fixtures, equipment, consumables, electronics, and containers. Now, campus management can manage anything that can be labeled, tagged, located, loaned, rented or stolen.
The smart campus is designed with sustainability in mind. Energy provision is aligned with user behavior to deliver “just enough energy, just in time” based on planned, predicted, requested, or sensed demand. Precise monitoring enables waste reduction initiatives. By monitoring disposal and recycling, campuses can reduce their footprint.
The modern campus often depends on third-party suppliers including for functions like: catering, parking, access control, security, transport, hospitality, retail, and waste management. Campus management can create rules surrounding third-party access by granting appropriate access to on-campus and remote resources and to key systems to enable remote control, inspection, condition-based maintenance, servicing, replenishment, system integration, allocation and asset management.
The smart campus is smarter with hybrid technology. The ratio of online vs. on-campus individuals guides campus planning—like building design and flow topology, space allocation—like room sizes, and load balancing over time.
Start building the flexible campus
