Digital Signage in Universities – The Future of Education
by Scala Team
Digital Signage in Universities – The Future of Education
by Esther Chew
To better engage with tech-savvy students, universities in India are embracing digital signage to become a modern, stimulating environment to learn, work and grow. With the latest digital signage technologies, universities can communicate quickly and effectively with students, teachers, and visitors.
The statistics in support of leveraging digital technology to aid learning are remarkable. According to McGraw-Hill Education’s 2015-2016 Digital Study Trends in Higher Education Survey, 84% of students reported that technology helps their professors and teaching assistants to be more efficient and effective in teaching classes, and 86% agreed that technology helps them to be more efficient and effective students. 46% said that technology helps improve confidence and 45% revealed that it helps reduce stress.
In this article, we explore several ways that digital signage can be used for the modern university.
Design dynamic and engaging content
Digital signage is a network of screens that shows deliberate content to those walking by in a passive, non-intrusive way. The beauty of digital signage scheduling is that it allows you to pepper the essential with the engaging. Unlike emails, handouts and even mobile apps, digital signage enables the creation of dynamic and visually stimulating content to elicit audience response and drive action.
Furthermore, with flexible cloud-based digital signage, any authorized person can easily control the entire network of screens from any internet-accessible location, while enabling customized content for specific audiences based on screen location. This allows administrators from different departments to curate information that is pertinent to their target audiences, such as setting content specific to those who frequent any given building or location on campus.
Create a great first impression
As students, visitors and faculty enter the school, greeting them with a warm welcome message and school news headlines on outdoor digital signage is an excellent way to make a solid impression. Digital screens located in the lobby can feature a live news feed to entertain and inform visitors and provide a pleasing atmosphere while reinforcing your university’s brand.
Provide dynamic wayfinding
Interactive wayfinding kiosks utilising intelligent tablets located throughout the campus are a fantastic way to help students, visitors and faculty locate destinations and find their way around. Maps and directions can be easily updated. In addition, walking times to the nearest coffee joint along the way can be featured, improving the campus experience.
Promote campus safety
Providing a safe and secure environment to study and work is a top priority for any educational institution. Digital signage helps to achieve this goal by easily integrating with an emergency alert system that immediately communicates emergencies, for example, incidence of fire and school closings. Digital signage for universities can also efficiently communicate emergency contact information, emergency plans, campus maps, and real-time messages about what students and faculty should do in a certain situation.
Communicate campus events
Universities are always buzzing with events, and digital signage is a powerful platform to promote these events and provide your audience with useful and timely updates. From job fairs, carnivals, graduations, sports events and other activities, digital display screens for universities can be deployed to keep students and faculty in the loop. In addition, a social media live feed can be displayed on digital signage to feature event photos.
Virtual Classroom
In addition to improving the campus environment, digital signage also presents a unique teaching experience with real-time engagement to remote instructors and participants alike. X2O’s virtual classroom technology creates an engaging immersive environment with multiple camera views and enables remote users to participate in everything that is taking place within the live classroom. Featuring high-definition, bi-directional audio/visual communication, interactive whiteboards, presentation monitors with content sharing and a suite of integrated collaboration tools – the X2O Virtual Classroom is designed to facilitate interaction between instructors and participants.
Conclusion
When it comes to campus communication, digital signage is the clear winner. Universities can take advantage of the latest digital signage technology to communicate quickly and effectively with students and faculty.
Scala delivers a stable, flexible, scalable and user-friendly platform to help administrators roll-out campus-wide communication. Click here
to find out how Scala can help universities in India transform the campus experience.
About the Author:
Scala digital signage experts share their experience and thoughts in our blog to provide practical tips and advice for real-world applications. Our team aims to offer interesting content through a variety of formats including long form articles, video logs, interviews and infographics.
