Empowering Campuses with Higher Education Digital Signage
Colleges and universities are places where large amounts of information is distributed every day – and not just in classes. School administrators often find it challenging to communicate relevant information to students and visitors without also overloading them.
One tool for disseminating specific information in a timely manner to the correct audience is digital signage. Nearly 70 percent of today’s colleges use digital signage systems to help them in different ways.
Why Educators Should Use Digital Signage
Digital signage saves printing resources
No more running off dozens of copies of the same sign to announce an event, only to throw them away at the end of the week.
Digital signs draw attention
While it's easy to overlook a drab and motionless poster, it's much harder to look past a dynamic image.
Digital signage is memorable and drives action
In fact, seeing dynamic digital signage can elicit an emotional response prompting people to act on the information, which is great if you're, say, trying to guilt students into finally filling out their course evaluation surveys.
So how are those 70 percent of colleges and universities using their digital signage solutions? It’s a good question. An institution of higher learning doesn’t want to spend money on a system, but then not have enough content to justify the expenditure.
Here are six ways colleges and universities are using digital signage:
1. Distribute Information
There’s a lot of general information that needs to get out on college campuses.
Digital signage can provide a home for most of it. This includes:
Administration data dashboards
Athletics schedules
Department Hours
Special events
Building closure dates and times
There are two key categories of content digital signage can be used to showcase – data visualization tools and custom curated content. Let’s take a look.
Real-Time Data Displays
As a school, you’ve invested in the dashboard tools needed to better analyze and visualize your important data, such as enrollment information, building usage stats, student and staff achievements, and more. And, you likely have people dedicated to building dashboards and reports.
But, the tools you invested in have a limited reach throughout your campus. Skykit’s Dashboard Connection tool allows you to securely share your organization’s dashboards on a digital signage display giving your faculty and staff better visibility into the data pertinent to them, driving them to better decision making.
Custom Curated Content
Digital signage makes information available when and where it’s needed. Whether you need to distribute athletics schedules to the entire school or biology departmental notices, content can be scheduled and updated remotely, at a moment’s notice if need be.
Information like faculty office hours can appear on some screens but not others, depending on where it’s relevant.
Skykit Beam supports a wide range of content types that can be used to communicate with your students, staff, and faculty, ensuring your displays are relevant to your audience.
2. Reinforce Learning
Digital signage provides many opportunities to use multimedia to enhance lectures. Professors can display slides outlining important points or play videos related to the content.
3. Enhance Community
Digital signage can be a great way to enhance interdepartmental recognition of student accomplishments.
It’s easy for students to get invested in their own little group of people while attending college and forget the rest of the school exists.
Help ensure your student body doesn’t miss out on the cool things their fellow students are doing.
4. Emergency Announcements
Centralized digital signage allows colleges and universities to get the word out whenever and wherever on campus. Screens can flash in bold colors to draw attention to the emergency alert and provide instructions on where students should go and what they should do to be safe.
As long as there’s power and internet access, the signs can be updated instantly and remotely.
Skykit and emergency alerts powered by InformaCast allow you to automatically override existing content to quickly share critical communications to all of your screens.
InformaCast safety and security messaging alerts include severe weather, 911 alerting, building lockdown, building evacuation, active shooter, scheduled notifications, and panic buttons.
Broadcasting your emergency alerts quickly and efficiently is easy to do with Skykit Beam, available with Pro and Enterprise licenses, and InformaCast. Skykit’s partnership with InformaCast allows your school to be NFPA72 (National Fire Protection Safety Act 72) compliant helping keep your occupants safe and secure.
5. Wayfinding
Sprawling campuses can be difficult for visitors and new students to navigate. Even college seniors might find themselves looking for a building they’ve never been in before.
Static maps fade and are difficult to update as buildings are constructed and renamed, or roads and sidewalks are temporarily obstructed for events or construction.
Digital signage allows students to search for a specific building or office within that building and even send directions to their phone or display a dotted line showing the best way to get there. Construction and route closures can be inputted into the system remotely by administrators.
6. Space Booking
University and college campuses are filled with meeting and study spaces, both formal and informal. Reserving spaces can be challenging, especially if it can only be done from a computer.
Skykit’s Turf Space Booking technology is a powerful space reservation tool that lets students, staff, and faculty reserve spaces using a touch display or their existing calendar app.
Whether the space is a communal gathering area, study room, or individual study pod, Turf’s calendar integration or touch display allows you to easily reserve a space eliminating conflicts of double-booked spaces and letting meeting spaces go unused.
Conclusion
As 70 percent of colleges have discovered, digital signage is a great tool for the higher education setting.
It allows for the efficient distribution of day-to-day and emergency information, analytics dashboards for administration, enhance students’ experiences inside the classroom and out, and helps people navigate campus smoothly.
