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 residence” expertise, driving larger engagement and safety for his or her customers, whereas being easy and dependable to make use of. However usually ignored is the community behind all of it.
When Biola College, a personal Christian college in Southern California, sought options, they reached out to their pals at Cisco. At this time, partly one in all our two-part sequence on making a safe student-centric expertise, we talk about their know-how journey with Scott Himes, Biola’s director of community operations.
Q: Previous to Cisco, what was your know-how 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 right down to it, the instruments should do what the instruments must do. And Cisco’s achieved this for Biola — and it’s achieved it properly.
I feel one of many biggest testaments is we now have a community refresh fund which permits us to proactively cycle out community gear frequently. Nevertheless it doesn’t imply it’s at all times funded completely.
In some instances, we’ve acquired 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 alleged to. That’s such a testomony to Cisco’s construct high quality and their {hardware} capabilities. It’s simply doing what it’s alleged to do . . . in a means which you can belief. It’s only a strong product. We’ve been actually profitable with Cisco. It’s been a fantastic relationship.
The soundness that has come from that has been key, it’s been wonderful. We’re in a position to do some issues which can be past what we must always be capable of do with the variety of people who we now have. As a result of we’re not having to continually firefight, we’re not diverting time to place out the fires. We will give attention to innovating issues.
Q: What sort 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 making an attempt to make the dorm expertise, from a wi-fi standpoint, extra like the house community expertise that they arrive from.
Their community at residence simply works. They take a look at connecting all their units, their Apple TV’s, gaming programs, all that stuff like that and every little thing works the way in which it’s alleged to — and it doesn’t actually work that means in a college community. So, we’ve been working to implement Cisco’s resolution, consumer outlined networking (UDN), to enhance that situation, enhance the way in which that units 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 resolution.
Q: How are you leveraging automation to reinforce your community?
A: We’re primarily utilizing Cisco Catalyst Heart 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 Heart as properly, so we will begin automating the method of software program upgrades to assist pace up the method of {hardware} substitute.
So, once we put new switches in place on campus, we will simply deploy the configuration to them. We will replicate what was there on the earlier {hardware}, and get it get it again up and working as rapidly as potential.
Q: Are you able to inform us a bit about your method to community safety at Biola, and why it is necessary?
A: I feel community safety is inherent, it’s one thing that’s vital. We see it at each degree of the campus community. As a result of we’ve been engaged on this UDN resolution, scholar community safety has been high of thoughts.
We’ve been making an attempt to place this resolution in place, partly as a result of it permits scholar units to work simply collectively, plus it secures them within the course of. It offers a bit containerized community for scholar units that isolates their units from their roommate’s or neighbors’ units. It permits them to make use of precisely what they need 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 units they need to share.
Subsequent up
Now that we’ve taken a quick take 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 Finest Expertise: Exploring the Roles and Applied sciences of Expertise Pushed Establishments in Increased Training. Be part of our Cisco schooling specialists as they go deeper to discover the worth, methods, and applied sciences which can be remodeling student-centric experiences.
Plus, search for half two of our weblog sequence titled Creating A Safe Pupil-Centric Expertise: Taking Management, coming quickly.
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