How Ignia’s Smart Campus can help you meet staff and Student expectations, deliver world-class facilities, and gain an all-important competitive edge.

Running a higher education institution can be complex. As well as the day-to-day management of your people, programs and facilities, there’s the ongoing challenge of securing funding, increasing enrollments of local and international students – both undergrad and postgrad – and keeping them engaged as they transition throughout student life. You also face ever-present federal government
budget cuts; a greater reliance upon a complex mix of students; and growing competition from non-traditional providers and
international universities with large budgets.

Your students of today – and your future alumni – are also more digitally savvy than ever before. Timely access to contextual information is an expectation, not a ‘nice to have’. Meanwhile, the need to maintain and improve academic performance and research quality remains paramount.

To address these challenges, and gain a distinct competitive advantage, many higher education institutions are turning to technology-based solutions, to identify efficiencies, empower staff , build and optimise student relationships, and drive retention rates; particularly in that difficult first year of study.

How Ignia’s Smart Campus can help

Ignia’s Smart Campus, is a holistic digital solution based on the Microsoft platform. It leverages an integrated suite of industry-leading technologies to deliver tangible outcomes that align with your university’s unique strategic vision. Ignia’s Smart Campus can help you dramatically improve the services your university provides, and the way you interact with staff , students and the community. It can help you attract, build and optimise relationships with prospective and current students, and build and add value to your alumni relationships. Plus, it can help you attract and foster the mix of students you need, in order to achieve your overall vision and educational objectives.

The five pillars of campus management

With Ignia’s Smart Campus, you can transform the way you manage and operate your university in five key areas:

1. Digital Student Journey
Deliver a rewarding, end-to-end digital experience for future, current and past students, which includes:

• Adding value throughout a student’s lifecycle by continually capturing and using data relating to their habits and preferences.
• Attracting, nurturing and converting more students, both under-grad and post-grad, with personalised and customised information and communications.
• Driving deeper connections by delivering rich, personalised, task-based content specific to where the student is at any point in time (e.g. providing course information to prospective students, or careers options for those nearing the end of their studies).
• Fostering stronger relationships with alumni to drive greater value in terms of bequests, referrals and family loyalty, and driving greater links with the business community.

The technology:
• Sitecore
• Azure
• Custom web applications
• Azure Redis Cache
• Azure SQL

2. Connected Workplace
Give your staff access to a cloud-based suite of productivity tools based on Microsoft Office 365, to help them conduct research, communicate and share information. Your staff will be able to work more effectively and also gain access to a set of robust and highly secure tools to help them collaborate with both internal and external parties, content providers and post-graduates. These tools include automatic backups, versioning control, data governance and information protection features.

The technology:
• Office 365
• Office 365 Data Governance
• Azure Information Protection

3. Connected Campus
Ignia’s Smart Campus can help you capture practical insights from across your campus, in real-time, in order to improve decision making and enable you to respond to the needs of your staff and students. You can improve facility, course and lecture planning by merging data on class metrics and lecture times, with data on real foot traffic – gleaned through outdoor Wi-Fi technology – to quickly uncover any discrepancies between anticipated and actual traffic, and make any required adjustments. By connecting to existing lecture facilities you can provide student assistant services such as real-time transcribing, translations, or remote/recorded access with live chat support. Facilities such as lighting can also be connected to operate when required to avoid high energy usage and asset maintenance costs.

The technology:
• Azure Stream Analytics
• Integration with Cisco Meraki
• Azure IoT Hub

4. Smart Student Tools
Leveraging the technology for students allows you to improve and enhance their study experience by providing useful tools, virtual assistants and facilitating participation in study groups and guilds. This includes:

• Secure, ad-hoc study groups, which students can connect to from anywhere.
• Classroom collaboration tools, such as Class OneNote, file sharing, and lecture broadcast/playback features.
• Timetable-related insights (e.g. alerts when a student needs to leave their current location to get to their next class).
• Targeted updates on industry or social event participation, based on group, class or peer attendance.

The technology:
• Office 365 for Education (including Sharepoint Teams)
• Office 365 Groups
• OneNote for Classroom
• Microsoft LUIS
• Azure Chatbots

5. Data Insights
Many institutions have data quality and governance issues that can lead to poor insights and unreliable results. Reports can be expensive to customise, time consuming to produce and lack “big picture” information. With Ignia’s Smart Campus Data Insights, you gain access to self-service reporting tools that allow internal and external data to be pulled together, to drive meaningful insights that help with decision making. Enhanced data management and governance allows you to enjoy far greater control over your campus – both now, and into the future.

The technology:
• Cortona Intelligence Suite
• Azure SQL
• Cognitive Services
• Advanced Analytics
• Azure Machine Learning
• Microsoft R Server
• Apache Hadoop
• Spark

Why Ignia, an Insight company
Ignia, An Insight Company, is a national leader in providing a broad mix of technology advisory, design, and implementation services with capabilities spanning strategy, digital, cloud, mobility and analytics. With the proven experience in the education sector, Ignia will take the time to listen to your requirements, and provide a fully customised, robust solution to meet your specific needs.

For more information, visit Ignia's Smart Campus page.