IoT in Education: Observations from the ACC Conference

We had a fantastic time at the ACC Conference this week which we hosted with our partner HPE. Part of the personal interaction opportunity we had at the conference was a 45-minute session around IoT, which ran over to 1 hour.

Typically, I’m used to attending sessions at tech conferences where everyone walks in the room with enough knowledge to at least be dangerous and potentially belligerent to the speaker.  This was a very different session.

We set this session up as a round table discussion because the attendees of the conference were predominantly Leadership and Administrative staff. This is what we learned:

1. The attendees ranged from- “I know I have some wifi in my campus” to “I’ve heard about IoT but have absolutely no idea what it means” They attended to learn from us.
2. None of them had any idea about the amount of information that was walking around their campus.
3. None of them had ever thought through what they could do with this data.
4. From their feedback,  it dawned on me that the Community Colleges have been woefully undereducated on 1) the power of analytics to drive a better student experience 2) the power of IoT to drive more profit to the University.
5. From their feedback,  it also dawned on me that they may utilize even more edge devices than larger Universities due to their budget constraints for purchasing large centralized systems.
6. They all reported that “Network” seems to be the first to suffer on their campus,  this was even reported by Community College Daily last year.  It may be network,  it may be general management of the pure crush on the infrastructure to handle this new influx of information. Again, many colleges are struggling to keep up with the most basic demand due to this trend.
7. At the end of the session - all of them wanted to “Implement IoT”- yikes.

For those of you in IT at these campuses, it’s time to talk.  IoT is not just about your student’s iPhones. It is their parents' Fitbit, their girlfriend’s gift of a smart coffee maker, and, most somberly, their ex-girlfriend’s location on the campus if she is bent on revenge.

Cima and HPE have the skills to help you design, deploy, and operationalize IoT.  Please contact us today to set up a consultation.