Smart Campus for Embracing Digital Native Lifestyle

The concept of the smart campus has been making waves at universities across the globe. At its core a smart campus links, devices, applications, and people to enable new services and experiences to improve operational efficiency. It creates a more flexible learning environment to suite the course material.  When educational settings connect sensors, building systems and other devices they can begin to collect data from various sources across the institution.  All of that data can be gathered, stored, accessed, and used by campus operations teams to pursue the common goals of IoT implementations advantageous in reducing energy consumption and power costs, refining services on campus to make them convenient and useful.

With networked computing technology, new learning models emerge which gives every student uninterrupted access to audio and video tools, join collaborative working sessions thus fitting in the digital native lifestyle. With access to capabilities such as screencasting and file- and application-sharing from their personal devices students can work collaboratively on the same task without being in the same physical space. With wifi and other technologies, students can access grades, assignments, submitting homework, even online assessments at any time, from any personal device.  Students can participate in live lectures from their devices, participate in discussions, download course materials, and submit assignments remotely.

The lab doesn’t have to be at a fixed location on a smart campus. Instead, institutions can virtually set up cloud resources and deliver them to students wherever they are and spin them back down again when they are no longer using it. The spaces reserved for dedicated computing resources can be repurposed for something else. Also, students, faculties and administrators no longer need to worry about space constraints, location, or weather.

By embracing the idea of the smart campus by creating a single technology infrastructure to connect devices, applications and people forward-looking educational institutions can build a foundation for the future.