Hi-tech campus?

An article on connected cities in the latest edition of Wired Magazine got me thinking. It talked of solar powered bike paths, footfall sensors and other Internet enabled environments. I wondered if such ideas could also be applied to schools, colleges and universities to make life easier. The fine balance between surveillance and freedom must be considered of course, but what applications of smart technology might we introduce into education?

I'm an associate professor at Plymouth University, in South West England. It's a compact inner city campus, and it's a great environment to work in, with everything close at hand. However, the longer you work on a single campus, the more you notice the inherent problems that exist. One of the problems I have known about for a while is the log-jam of students that occurs every two hours or so in one of our main lecture centres. It doesn't actually demand a high-tech solution, just some common sense.

The Sherwell Centre (pictured) is an old United Reform Church building, which several years ago was converted (see what I did there?) into a facility that features two large upstairs lecture theatres. There are two staircases either side leading up to the front of each lecture theatre and there is a third staircase at the rear. Lectures are scheduled for 2 hours duration, and whilst one large cohort of 200 or so students is exiting, another 200 or so is queuing up on the stairs outside waiting to enter. Students invariably use the same door to exit and enter. This causes delays and frustration, and creates potential health and safety issues. One smart solution of course, would be for the exiting students to use on door while the entering students use another. This would improve the flow of students, lectures could start on time and the risk to injury could be minimised. And yet, as far as I am aware, no-one has ever officially suggested this as a solution.

Another problem we experience with large cohorts of students gathered together in lecture halls, is how to take an attendance register. We need to do this not only to maintain a record of who has been present at each lecture, but also for health and safety reasons. If there is a fire or other major incident and we need to evacuate the building, someone needs to know that everyone has exited safely. Some students have been caught marking other students as present when they are in fact absent. It's a practice we have tried to dissuade, but it will no doubt continue, as the errant few 'cover' for their mates. A technology solution here (and one that I have been told is planned) is to issue each student with a smart card which they are then required to swipe to enter and exit the lecture theatre. This sounds a little mechanistic and managerial, and there are potential problems with students forgetting their cards, or losing them, but it is a solution many university campuses are adopting across the globe to keep tabs on comings and goings of large groups of students. It eliminates the need to pass sheets of paper around, and gets around later claims that students were present or absent which cannot be verified.

These are just two of the instances of how campus life could be made smarter. One is no-tech and the other is low-tech. What might the hi-tech applications be? I'm sure there are many you can think of from your own experiences working in schools, colleges or universities. What innovations would you like to see in your hi-tech connected campus in the future? Please comment if you wish to share.

Photo by Hugh Venables


Hi-tech campus? by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.