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Universities, despite their wisdom and intelligence, cannot avoid having a complex maze of classrooms and buildings across their campuses, it's in the nature of the tertiary game. There is a lot to learn, many facilities to manage and hundreds of students that need to navigate between classrooms, study and events.
It’s no mean feat to run an operation like this, from an internal planning perspective and also from a student engagement point-of-view.
Universities have certainly come a long way with digital transformation. University apps have become the new norm to guide students and faculty to food outlets, buildings, quiet study spaces, health and medical services and more.
There is now technology available that further enhances the student experience by helping students find their way to their classroom, study session or library desk while they are already within a building.
Moreover, location intelligence is now at the forefront of facility management at Universities. Imagine being able to see information on a campus map that provides capacity levels of buildings and classrooms in near real-time, which rooms are using high amounts of electricity or where AV equipment such as smart boards or projectors can be found.
It’s all possible and we can tell you how.
Indoor wayfinding within your campus app
“Have you been to Building 25? Last week I was in room 3:12.4, this week I went back and I couldn’t find it. It’s impossible!”
Any University or TAFE student will tell you about ‘that’ building that everyone dreads entering because they can never seem to be able to find their room in time for the class to start. This causes pent up frustration from students, and also faculty who want to start their classes on time.
MapsIndoors is a product from MapsPeople, an indoor wayfinding company based in Denmark. The product enables organisations with complex indoor setups to embed indoor mapping capability into their app to ease frustrating user experiences and enhance information flow that gets users from A to B.
For example: If a student has a tutorial that finishes at 11.30am and they need to make their way across campus for a lecture at 12.00pm, MapsIndoors will show them the most efficient path to take from their tutorial seat, to the lecture theatre - all the while flipping between indoor and outdoor navigation.
In another instance, you can implement MapsIndoors to help students find vacant desks in the library. By fixing sensors to each desk, students can make a desk booking from their University app and walk from their location to that exact desk.
Enhance facilities management with location intelligence
Facilities management in academic institutions can be a costly and time-consuming exercise. Knowing when a projector is faulty, which rooms have left their air conditioning on, which buildings have higher capacity time than others and how many car parking spaces are occupied or vacant is now made easier via the use of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and location intelligence.
Data collected from IoT devices around your University can often result in long-winded excel spreadsheets of data that are hard to make sense of. However, these data feeds can be directly ingested into Cloud software, enabling your organisation to crunch the numbers and make better decisions about your facilities.
For example: Google Cloud has a data storing capability called Big Query. Big Query is a highly scalable data storage option that can accept live data feeds into its system. The information collected can then be transferred onto a campus map so that you can see in near real-time the state of your facilities across the campus.
Here is an example of an IoT map we created for the City of Melbourne where vacant car spots are visualised using CARTO as the mapping platform:
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How can location intelligence enhance your University operations?
Liveli has extensive experience helping Universities enhance their digital capabilities with location intelligence. We are an integration partner for technologies such as MapsPeople, Google Maps, Google Cloud and CARTO who are leading location intelligence providers that can add value to your operations.
If you would like a demo of our University solutions, get in touch with our team for an obligation-free meeting.
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