How to enhance education with a smart campus
Provide your students, staff, and faculty with a better all-round experience through building a smart campus.
Your institution is constantly competing on multiple levels to attract new students, faculty, and staff. Choosing a university with a good academic reputation has always been important for students, but now they’re also taking your on-campus experience into consideration. Is your organisation ready for the smart campus?
Students, faculty, and teaching staff are interested in far more than what happens in the classroom when deciding their place of work or education. Like in their personal lives, they want a seamless and personal experience with technology that simplifies and streamlines their everyday needs – whether that’s travel, extracurricular activities, or living areas. By utilising technologies which other sectors have already become accustomed to using, your institution will begin to meet the needs of your digitally native students and staff. This is where adopting a smart campus is crucial for your institution.
What is a smart campus?
Smart campus describes an educational institution that uses internet-connected devices and advanced network infrastructure to enhance its student, faculty, and staff experiences. It creates a connected community that joins people, devices, and applications together and enables organisations to make well-informed data-driven decisions. Some of the key components that create a smart campus include:
Wireless networks:
high-speed, reliable wireless networks are essential for connecting devices and enabling communication between different systems
Internet of Things (IoT) devices:
these are devices that have sensors and can be connected to the internet, allowing them to collect and transmit data. This includes things like security cameras, temperature sensors, and lighting systems
Data analytics:
a smart campus uses data analytics to make sense of the large amount of data generated by IoT devices. This allows for real-time monitoring and more efficient decision-making
Automation:
autonomously control various systems on campus, including lighting, heating, and ventilation
Communication:
smart campuses allow easier communication between students, staff, and campus management through digital signage, mobile apps, and messaging systems
Security:
smart campuses tend to have advanced security systems and protocols in place to ensure the safety of students, staff, and visitors
By integrating these different technologies and infrastructure, your campus will become more connected, responsive, and sustainable.
Smart campus case study
University of Stirling
Take a look at how we helped the University of Stirling become more sustainable and support its students’ evolving learning requirements, by transforming them into a smart campus.
What are the benefits of a smart campus?
A smart campus provides your institution with new services and processes to make your student and faculty’s education, work, and life easier and more efficient. By building on the foundations that already exist at your institution, adopting a smart campus will not only make you a more attractive option for both students and staff, but also allow you to operate more efficiently and effectively.
Proactive, data-driven decision-making is important for the development of your educational institution. Smart campuses are constantly collecting real-time data from your students and staff for use across your organisation.
This data provides you with insights into how your students and employees operate on a day-to-day basis, enabling you to create incredibly personalised and efficient experiences.
Ensuring the safety of both your students and staff is always a high priority in educational institutions, whether that’s physically on your campus or online. While higher education campuses are generally a safe space for everyone, added protection against new and more advanced threats is always a necessity.
Campus ID cards and security systems connected to the network assure your students and staff that they’re safe and always tracked. Whereas up-to-date and advanced cyber security and data protection protects your confidential information from hidden threats.
Implementing an IoT infrastructure will not only automate and streamline your processes, but also reduce your operational costs.
By replacing your outdated, inadequate procedures with innovative practices, you’re able to work proactively to address issues and operate effectively. Automation tools will enable you to free up administration time and redirect resources currently assigned to your staff.
Using technology and data analytics, smart campuses provide your staff, faculty, and students with real-time information and access to key resources. Through digital signage, mobile apps, and messaging platforms, your institution can spread campus-wide messaging such as class schedules, building hours, and emergency notifications quickly and effectively.
Additionally, data analytics enables you to identify patterns and trends that help to improve communication and awareness between students, faculty, and staff, such as student engagement and performance.
To meet the UK government’s 25-year environmental plan and net-zero strategy, adopting a sustainable smart campus is a vital step. Smart campuses enable you to improve sustainability in several ways:
- Energy efficiency
- Water management
- Sustainable transportation
- Waste management
- Green buildings
Get support and advice on your smart campus
Speak to us about the challenges your institution is currently facing and what you require adopt and develop into a smart campus.
How to build a smart campus
Many institutions have begun to explore the potential of smart campuses, however, only a few have created long-term strategies for implementing one. To successfully plan the future of your smart campus, you must have a clear understanding of your data. This will be key to the decisions you’ll make moving forward as you plan to optimise your processes and tailor your environment to the needs of your students and staff.
By analysing and tracking every element of your institution, you’ll be able to proactively solve problems, make improvements, and design a campus that offers the best user experience for everyone.
Using Microsoft Azure’s high-performance computing, data, and analytics, your institution has a foundation to build its smart campus. This secure and scalable cloud platform empowers you with the integration, management, and support of your:
- Data and analytics
- Security and compliance
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning
- IoT devices and sensors
Securing a smart campus
Securing your students’ and faculty’s physical and online safety is a high priority for any educational institution. Cameras, lighting, and secure buildings are all ways to protect their physical safety, however, as everyone is becoming more digitally native, how much have you considered their online safety?
As of 2021, the most common types of cyber incidents in the education sector are phishing attacks and ransomware. These forms of malware stop you from accessing your systems and target the data that’s within them. Once breached, this data is typically either encrypted, deleted, or stolen – and even the computer itself may become inaccessible.
Personal and confidential information, including addresses, banking details, and relatives’ information is all available to cyber criminals if not securely protected. Plus, with the majority of work and resources now saved online and on servers, it’s imperative this is secure and backed up in case of emergencies.
How to create a sustainable smart campus
UK education institutions have a goal of being the world leaders in sustainability and climate change by 2030 in the education sector, and becoming a sustainable smart campus accelerates this. Their aim is to achieve this through a combination of:
- Education and practical experiences for students
- Adopting buildings and systems for the effects of climate change
- Enhancing biodiversity and improving air quality
- Transitioning to be net zero
Many organisations are adopting a cloud infrastructure to reduce their carbon output, due to the emissions that an on-premises system emits. It reduces your need for physical infrastructure and will reduce your energy consumption and device and equipment waste.
Additionally, as a sustainable smart campus, you’ll have the ability to track and analyse all the carbon emissions you emit using data and analytics. Our award-winning sustainability app enables you to track every aspect of your institution, including student and staff travel data, your IT infrastructure, electricity and water consumption in your buildings, and your waste and recycling. All this data in one place allows you to easily record and manage your emissions and reach your goal of being net zero.
Supporting a smart campus
As smart campuses adopt a lot of new technologies and processes that you haven’t previously had to manage, they can add extra strain and take up resources without the time or budget to support them. When creating a smart campus, you’ll need to consider extra support for your:
- IT infrastructure
- IoT devices
- Security
- Hybrid work and learning
Catering for all this in-house can be challenging for your institution without extra support, but working with a partner like us saves valuable resources.
How to enhance education with a smart campus FAQs:
With a smart campus, there are many ways a student can improve their engagement. Giving access to way finding tools to navigate the campus or finding available parking or desk space. Additionally, increased security from sensors and cameras managed by AI and automation to manage lighting and footfall requirements.
A smart campus is also able to track a student’s time on campus, usage of internal systems, time spent in libraries and utilising resources, and their grades to track students that require more support.
Start building your smart campus today
Arrange your free one-to-one consultation with our education IT specialists to discuss the future of your institution and for advice on how to build and develop your smart campus.
You can also email us at [email protected] or call 01904 562200 – whatever works best for you.