As establishments of upper schooling search methods to deal with scholar retention, they’re more and more turning to applied sciences that promise extra of an “at home” expertise, driving better engagement and safety for his or her customers, whereas being easy and dependable to make use of. It is named a student-centric expertise. But typically missed is the community behind all of it.
When Biola University, a non-public Christian college in Southern California, sought options, they reached out to their associates at Cisco. Today, partially certainly one of our two-part collection on making a safe student-centric expertise, we talk about their expertise journey with Scott Himes, Biola’s director of community operations.
Q: Prior to Cisco, what was your expertise like and why did you select to stick with Cisco?
A: We’ve been Cisco clients for fairly a while, 20 plus years, since earlier than I began on the college. When it comes all the way down to it, the instruments should do what the instruments have to do. And Cisco’s completed this for Biola — and it’s completed it properly.
I believe one of many best testaments is we now have a community refresh fund which permits us to proactively cycle out community tools regularly. But it doesn’t imply it’s all the time funded completely.
In some instances, we’ve bought these switches which have been on the market working for eleven, even twelve years . . . they usually’re simply working like champs. They’re doing precisely what they’re speculated to. That’s such a testomony to Cisco’s construct high quality and their {hardware} capabilities. It’s simply doing what it’s speculated to do . . . in a manner that you would be able to belief. It’s only a stable product. We’ve been actually profitable with Cisco. It’s been an important relationship.
The stability that has come from that has been key, it’s been superb. We’re in a position to do some issues which can be past what we must always be capable to do with the variety of those that we now have. Because we’re not having to consistently firefight, we’re not diverting time to place out the fires. We can concentrate on innovating issues.
Q: What form of challenges had been you dealing with?
A: One problem we’ve been working to resolve on our campus has been the issue of scholars wanting to enhance the community connectivity within the dorms, actually attempting to make the dorm expertise, from a wi-fi standpoint, extra like the house community expertise that they arrive from.
Their community at dwelling simply works. They have a look at connecting all their gadgets, their Apple TV’s, gaming methods, all that stuff like that and the whole lot works the best way it’s speculated to — and it doesn’t actually work that manner in a college community. So, we’ve been working to implement Cisco’s answer, consumer outlined networking (UDN), to enhance that situation, enhance the best way that gadgets join and work collectively once they come onto the campus — and the way they work in our enterprise community — making it act extra like a house community situation and answer.
Q: How are you leveraging automation to reinforce your community?
A: We’re primarily utilizing Cisco Catalyst Center for consumer outlined networking. We’re utilizing it to deploy our wi-fi controllers and our wi-fi entry factors, and to configure the wi-fi community as an entire.
And we’re simply beginning to add our wired community infrastructure into Cisco Catalyst Center as properly, so we are able to begin automating the method of software program upgrades to assist velocity up the method of {hardware} alternative.
So, after we put new switches in place on campus, we are able to simply deploy the configuration to them. We can replicate what was there on the earlier {hardware}, and get it get it again up and working as shortly as doable.
Q: Can you inform us a bit about your strategy to community safety at Biola, and why it’s important?
A: I believe community safety is inherent, it’s one thing that’s important. We see it at each stage of the campus community. Because we’ve been engaged on this UDN answer, scholar community safety has been high of thoughts.
We’ve been attempting to place this answer in place, partly as a result of it permits scholar gadgets to work simply collectively, plus it secures them within the course of. It offers a bit containerized community for scholar gadgets that isolates their gadgets from their roommate’s or neighbors’ gadgets. It permits them to make use of precisely what they wish to use on the campus community and restricts different individuals from them, but in addition permits them to ask different college students into their UDN, too, to allow them to share the gadgets they wish to share.
Next steps for a student-centric expertise
Now that we’ve taken a quick have a look at the applied sciences concerned in making a student-centric expertise, I invite you to take a deeper dive by exploring our newest interactive e book In Search of the Best Experience: Exploring the Roles and Technologies of Experience Driven Institutions in Higher Education. Join our Cisco schooling specialists as they go deeper to discover the worth, methods, and applied sciences which can be reworking student-centric experiences.
Plus, search for half two of our weblog collection titled Creating A Secure Student-Centric Experience: Taking Leadership, coming quickly.
Share: