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Smart Campuses
The next-generation campus
When it comes to technology, today’s university students and faculty are often embracing smarter solutions faster than the campuses on which they study and work. Digitally savvy, they are accustomed to a world where their homes, banks, stores, and sports offer a seamless connectivity that is as much about experience as it is about service.
A look at the next-generation campus
The next-generation campus looks decidedly different from universities and colleges of the past and in many cases, the present. Using technologies that enable frictionless, touchless, and intuitive experiences—driven by a digitally connected community—these smart campuses seize true transformation to provide the level of service their digitally native student body and faculty have come to expect.
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To stay competitive, institutions of higher learning must keep pace. Imagine if...answers to a late-night math question were addressed courtesy of a friendly chatbot...Entrance admissions applications were processed in hours, not weeks... Parking systems alerted motorists to nearest open spaces...Connected blackboards allowed professors to quickly share grading assignments with teaching assistants (TAs)...Courses were shared seamlessly from classrooms across the country. These are just a few advancements enabled by a smart campus. By embracing a smart campus strategy, institutions can help ensure they stay sustainable and relevant, enhancing the experience for students, faculty, administrators, and researchers, as well as for the surrounding community in which they coexist. |
Why smart campus?
Imagine if various technological infrastructures and platforms siloed by strategy could seamlessly communicate in a manner that produces positive outcomes for a next-generation campus.
What is a smart campus?
Smart Campus is a term used to describe educational institutions that use next-generation technologies woven seamlessly within a well-architected infrastructure. This enables a "digitally connected” institution that can enhance the campus experience, drives operational efficiency, and provides education in a manner that all can access. It creates proactive interactions to foster positive outcomes. A Smart Campus framework can create a digitally connected institution that:
Deloitte smart campus capability framework
A smart campus is more than a collection of applications, platforms, or infrastructures leveraged in a siloed manner around campuses. It uses next-generation technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, blockchain, facial recognition, smart sensors, and beacons—technologies that are strategically placed to trigger communications, take attendance automatically, derive venue analytics, automate processes, monitor and initiate workflows, and offer many more innovative practices that digital natives are accustomed to.
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Smart student Digital student |
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Smart housing and dining Logistics and services provisioning |
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Smart stadiums Fan experience and operations |
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Smart classroom and lab Next-gen classroom and labs |
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Smart mobility Campus mobility and safety |
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Smart student administration Student administration |
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Smart teaching and research Instructions and research |
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Smart events Event logistics and services |
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Smart operations Campus and building operations |
Four principles for designing a smart campus
The focal point of a smart campus is to enable innovative practices to modernize the campus experience while leveraging it to drive operational efficiency. The key element is interconnectivity and the benefits that provides. At Deloitte we focus on four key principles in our design to foster a connected and consumer-grade experience for anyone who interacts with the campus.
Intuitive and simple to use
Design thinking and persona-centric
Modular, adaptive, flexible, and intelligent
Adoptable and scalable
Students (digital natives) and other higher education constituents want to interact with a system that is innate and effortless to use. The underlying platform should deliver an amazing, intuitive user experience. Interaction with the platform should be enabled by multiple interfaces—video, voice, gesture, touch. The platform should be designed to address who is served and how. Our design thinking and persona-centric principles work to help schools solve for all this.
Real intelligence and value for a smart campus will be derived from thinking about personae—the human users—their user journeys and underlying use cases, and users’ experiences when they interact with the smart campus platform.
Campus needs and the technology to support them will constantly evolve. To address this challenge, a smart campus solution can use a domain-driven design architecture that would be based on microservices that guide campus transformation. This architecture approach provides the flexibility of “morphing” services, which allows the smart campus to evolve over time (future-proof) and allows capabilities to be reused in any manner. This in turn helps systems to be designed in a manner that ensures the ever-changing needs of end users are addressed.
The solution ideally can allow colleges and universities to collaborate with peers and scale massively. While most higher education institutions are local in their reach and scale, in order to meet the institution’s goals a smart campus solution can allow global scalability: The solution can be able to leverage digital tools and technologies to provide seamless data-driven experiences while enabling access and scale. Whether students are in a physical classroom on campus or in a virtual online classroom (participating from anywhere in the world), the solution can be built to support them.
Who plays, works, lives on a smart campus
Click on the tiles below to learn more
Summary of the benefits of a smart campus
Smart campus implementation can enable the paradigm shift that innovative schools will embark on to transform their institutions to serve the needs of today’s and tomorrow's campuses. It can improve three important factors: experience, efficiency, and education. It can reshape how students study, how they learn, what they learn, and how they interact with an institution. It can be the catalyst for the transformation that will enable campuses to address the future of learning and the future of work while reshaping the campus experience. As needed, it can continue to serve the traditional campus while enabling it to adopt new approaches to serve in a manner that their digital native stakeholders have come to expect. Leveraging the benefits of a smart campus can allow institutions to modernize while remaining sustainable and relevant to the constituents they serve today. Below are some the benefits:
- A well-designed infrastructure and data strategy provides meaningful information that allows for responsive intervention between students, faculty, staff, and alumni.
- Today’s robust processing capabilities help campus staff analyze its enormous amounts of data, then proactively respond and foster positive outcomes.
- Provide collaborative educational tools that can support the academic journeys of all types of students.
- Enable connected automations to create a seamless and intuitive campus experience.
- Enable institutions to streamline processes, reduce costs, and become operationally more effective through insight, automation, and the replacement of antiquated procedures with innovative practices.
- Campuses are able to use insights gained from a data strategy to proactively address issues, enabling efficiency through thoughtful redesign.
- Similar to a city, maintaining buildings, facilities, landscape, and its power grids has become vital to a campus’s operational efficiency.
- Students, faculty, and staff receive a much more intuitive experience as they navigate the campus and surrounding communities. Interactions are more user-friendly and consumer-like by design.
- Students are empowered by choice and social awareness, and campuses can proactively interact and inform their constituents.
- The fabric of connectivity enables campuses to cultivate a sense of safety. A smart campus can use advancements like facial recognition, reporting and alert systems, gunshot sensors, location intelligence, and mining patterns to ensure constituents are safe.
- Improved connectivity for constituents with Wi-Fi and mobile applications that are responsive, reliable, and intuitive address their needs effectively and efficiently.
- Enables a campus to design and maintain a more efficient transportation and mobility strategy. Transportation is a key factor that impacts a student’s ability to continue his/her education. In many cases, surrounding city buses and trains play an integral role in getting students to and from campus. Also, since more and more students are adult workers, they need convenient options between work and campus.
- Fostering healthier constituents within the campus. With the use of wearables, schools and communities can promote a healthier lifestyle. While these wearables inform constituents of their health patterns, this information could also be used by campuses to address student health issues, which could impact retention as well as promote a healthier community, and potentially could reduce the impacts to health and human services.
- Understanding the patterns around various activities and initiatives within a campus can help a school foster inclusion and drive equity. Dashboards designed around inclusion and diversity can provide valuable, actionable insight.
- The knowledge gained from education drives the economy and improving access to education will only foster a more inclusive community.
Get in touch
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Roy Mathew Principal | Deloitte Consulting LLP |
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Tamara Cibenko Principal | Deloitte Consulting LLP |