iPhone University: At ACU, Students Navigate College Life via Apple iPhone
Every one of Abilene Christian University's (ACU) 950 incoming freshman this year got a free tool to manage college life: an Apple iPhone or iPod touch. Here's a look inside how the university is using the devices to enhance classroom learning and ease the transition into college life.
Lessons Learned
From an application perspective, Roberts says the preparation by both his and Langford's teams led to a smooth launch without any major surprises.
One lesson that Roberts and Langford can pass on from their experiences with Mobile ACU: proper preparation and planning on both the technical- and student sides is absolutely essential.
Roberts and his team worked hand and hand with Alcatel, ACU's wireless network infrastructure provider, throughout the year to ensure that the campus learning areas were blanketed with Wi-Fi.
Until this point, ACU's IT team had concentrated more on "breadth" as opposed to "depth," Roberts says.
Though there was Wi-Fi in the vast majority of the university's lecture halls, laboratories and libraries when the freshman arrived, it didn't take much to overload the network. This became a problem, because even though ACU's classes tend to be rather small--with 20 to 30 students--there's one freshman professor who's extremely popular, and his classes average 300 or so students at a given time. While ACU's Wi-Fi coverage was suitable for the smaller classes, the network was "brought to its knees" when all 300 students attempted to access it simultaneously, Roberts said. So the team called Alcatel back in and eventually installed an additional 243 wireless access points to address coverage issues.
Langford credits the technology team's efforts in preparing and distributing the phones to students and faculty as key to the project's success. For example, the phones were distributed to users during a four-day freshman-arrival period, during which some 23 Apple support representatives were on campus to help students with any issues they encountered. IT support reps literally roamed the corridors of residence halls looking for student in need of assistance. And iPhone-specific help guides were also distributed to new users along with their devices.
"You can't put too much attention to detail on the distribution of these things," Langford said.
Preparation aside, Roberts also learned something about the future of IT, he says.
"In today's world, new technologies come on at a pace that is so fast, the time between introduction and saturation happens in the blink of an eye," he says. "One of the things that was scariest for me as a CIO about this entire process was that we had to make some decisions on launch, well before we had all the details worked out, well before we knew whether or not the platform was going to work the way we wanted."
Proper preparation helps to mitigate the risks associated with new or untested technologies, but there's always going to be a certain level of uncertainly with initiatives like ACU's iPhone program, Roberts says.
"One of the lessons that I've learned is that this is going to be the world that we're going to live in in a lot of ways from now on," he said. "The days of being able to ponder on new tech for months and months and months and evaluate, I think those days are slipping away from us. That's exciting and scary at the same time."
