Compendium of Digital Innovations in Higher Education
Technology projects to enable digital transformation on your campus
This compendium is designed to help you identify trends in digital projects, engage in environmental scanning, and identify new opportunities for your own campus. The compendium is regularly updated, and shares snapshots of digital innovations across a broad range of strategic domains (Enrollment, Teaching & Learning [T&L], Facilities/Estates, Student Support, and Operations & Professional Services) and emerging technologies, helping universities kick-start initiatives for their own campuses.
Under each tab, you’ll see the tactics organized by scale of impact from high to low. Each tactic includes case study examples of how the digital innovation or tool helped solve a problem on a university campus. If you have a tactic or digital project you’d like to submit to the compendium, please click the button below to share your campus innovation, and someone from our team will get in touch with you.
-
Enrollment
-
T&L
-
Facilities/Estates
-
Student Support
-
Operations
Enrollment
High Scale of Impact
Virtual Campus Tours
360-degree virtual reality campus experiences expand geographic reach and give prospects an immersive sense of what it feels like to be on campus. Tours can be personalized and come with thousands of language, accent, and inflection permutations.
Problem to be Solved: Geography makes it difficult for students outside an institution’s region to participate in campus tours – an integral experience in the recruitment process.
The New School created a virtual, customized tour experience using YouVisit technology to target regional and international prospects. The New School was able to customize tours to the interests and journey of prospects. This allowed the New School to provide a version of the campus tour to prospective students who hitherto were unable to participate due to distance or other circumstances. The New School also used predictive learning to nudge prospects to apply. The tours reached over 93 countries and 17K visitors. The admit rate for those who took a virtual tour was over 10% higher than the overall admit rate.
AI Application Bots
Prospective student-facing AI bots answer common student inquiries which frees staff for more complex queries and helps handle spikes in questions asked. Bots can operate on websites, social media, text/SMS, and email. They also respond to queries outside of regular business hours.
Problem to be Solved: Prospective students are forced to maneuver clunky websites or speak with multiple people to get their questions answered.
Leeds Beckett University’s Recruitment and Marketing team created the AI bot, Becky, on Facebook Messenger to respond to basic student queries during the especially busy application season in August. Becky also used an algorithm to flag threads for human intervention. After introducing Becky, Leed Beckett’s prospect inquiries went up by nearly 5000%. Becky’s applicant conversion rate was 47% compared to the UK-wide average of 26%.
Medium Scale of Impact
CRM-Automated Personalized Recruitment Videos
Personalized recruitment videos based on student interests are automatically sent by CRMs to prospective students’ mobile devices. This reaches prospective students earlier in the evaluation stage with more curated and compelling messaging and invitations to apply.
Problem to be Solved: Prospective students are responding less and less to one-to-many recruitment campaigns; students want compelling, customized reasons to apply to an institution.
California Polytechnic State University’s (Cal Poly) enrollment management team sent personalized videos to prospective students’ mobile phones. The team employed the CRM to automate the process of matching students to curated videos aligned with their interests. If a student attended a concert hosted on campus, they were tagged as having an interest in music in the CRM. These videos helped make a typically impersonal, mass-recruitment approach more intimate at scale.
Cal Poly now has over 1,000 customized videos available and continues to expand and refresh video content specific to interests. For example, a prospective student interested in band who Cal Poly used to send a glossy photograph of a wonderful concert hall might now receive a video featuring a student playing on their trombone, talking about their experience with the campus marching band.
Google Cardboard Glasses Virtual Reality Tours
Personalized recruitment videos based on student interests are automatically sent by CRMs to prospective students’ mobile devices. This reaches prospective students earlier in the evaluation stage with more curated and compelling messaging and invitations to apply. University-branded Google Cardboard goggles hold phones that run a virtual tour app, mimicking a traditional VR headset experience. This lets students virtually interact with campuses from their own homes. Students will often continue to use and show their peers goggles and tours after leaving recruitment fairs.
Problem to be Solved: Geography makes it difficult for prospective students outside an institution’s region to participate in campus tours–an integral experience in the recruitment process.
Wayne State University’s IT, Enrollment, and Marketing teams developed university-branded Google Cardboard goggles to hand out to prospective students at recruitment fairs. The goggles allowed students to interact and tour campus virtually. Wayne State opted for the cardboard goggles because traditional VR headsets are clunkier, more expensive, and thus riskier to take on the road to recruitment fairs.
Wayne State set up 10,000 branded goggles at an investment of $2 per headset. The branded Google Cardboard headsets resulted in 10,000 direct recruitment interactions, and Wayne State has received many reports of students showing off and sharing goggles with their teachers and peers.
Low Scale of Impact
Livestream Digital Doorways
Two-way conversation portals allow prospective students to speak directly with students on campus. Digital doors provide a humanized view of the institution and a sense of accessibility to the institution community, no matter how far away the institution may be.
Problem to be Solved: Prospective students at recruitment fairs get a limited and generic sense of an institution through conversation with a recruitment fair campus representative.
University of Nottingham built and set up live digital doorways at campus recruitment fairs because recruitment leaders wanted to showcase the campus community. The livestream digital doorway experience required screens, lights, and speakers; a door for experience optics; a video chat function; reliable, robust wi-fi; and students to participate as on-campus guides. Digital doorways enabled current Nottingham students to have meaningful conversations with prospective students around the world. Having actual Nottingham students answer questions about student life helps convince prospective students that they could belong at Nottingham.
Virtual Communities
Two-way conversation portals allow prospective students to speak directly with students on campus. Digital doors provide a humanized view of the institution and a sense of accessibility to the institution community, no matter how far away the institution may be.
Problem to be Solved: Admitted students may feel disconnected, anxious, and isolated prior to joining a campus community, which contributes to summer melt.
George Mason University (GMU) invites all admitted students to join an online community of other students it has extended offers to. In this community, current GMU students field questions and provide feedback on their experiences. The community allows admits to test fit by engaging in conversations and building a community (chat rooms for students for specific states). The enrollment team also uses the app as a focus group to surface ongoing issues for staff participants, manage interventions by using keyword alerts, and harness student data.
Students are four times more likely to yield when they are successfully persuaded to join the community. The community is searchable by several different subgroups based on course, hometown, and student status (commuter or residential). The university also leverages academic or student support service experts to address more complex questions about academic programs and career outcomes.
Teaching & Learning
High Scale of Impact
Student Sentiment Tracking
Facial tracking analysis identifies peaks and troughs of student engagement. Instructors can use this information to design more engaging lectures and/or assignments.
Problem to be Solved: Instructors cannot always deliver lectures and gauge whether they are engaging students at scale.
University of Saint Thomas’ EmotionAPI platform monitors students’ emotional trajectory during lectures via facial tracking software. Instructors gain insight into student engagement and can tailor lectures to capture student interest.
Medium Scale of Impact
Digital Course Packs and One-Stop Course Resource Shops
A single, web portal collects and holds all course materials, including free, already licensed material. Portals prevent students from purchasing readily available resources and lets students view or print course materials on demand. Students only print what they need and pay for what they print.
Problem to be Solved: Students unnecessarily purchase resources already available to them from the institution’s library collections.
Wilfrid Laurier University’s IT department created digital course packs and a one-stop course resource shop to provide students all their course materials through a single web portal. Individual courses are pre-populated in the portal based on class load and students can print resources on demand or use digital copies. To create the course packs, the IT department wrote a script to check for overlap between course-assigned texts and digital resources already covered by institutional access. They found that 80% of course pack materials were available to students through library collections.
Automated Marking
Automated grading ensures quick and consistent grading of assignments and frees instructor time.
Problem to be Solved: Instructors spend too much time grading assignments, keeping them from more high-value tasks like advising and course preparation.
Johns Hopkins University employs the Gradescope platform to automate grading. The platform ensures speedy and consistent marking of student assignments, whether paper-based, digital, or code. Instructors can use Gradescope to help grade variable-length (e.g., problem sets, papers) and fixed-templates assignments (e.g., quizzes, exams). For example, students can upload completed problem sets and instructors can then use the online interface to create a grading rubric as well as provide custom feedback. If an instructor augments the rubric at any point, Gradescope retroactively applies this change to all previously graded assignments.
Virtual and Augmented Reality Site Visits
Virtual and augmented reality course simulations of real-world sites allow students to study and visually access and interact with traditionally inaccessible sites.
Problem to be Solved: Students cannot participate in valuable educational experiences due to cost, travel, or potential danger.
University of Illinois professors and computer science graduate students developed a VR-based archaeology course blending virtual and real worlds. Students learn archeology techniques and use VR to explore real-world excavation sites in a more accessible and cost-effective environment. For example, students in the class virtually explore a cave and conduct analyses and experiments in a virtual outdoor laboratory. Field work is an integral part of an archaeology education, but it can be very cost restrictive. These VR experiences make real-world educational experiences much more accessible. In the first year the class was offered, students could virtually examine over 110 artifacts.
Remotely Controlled Lab Experiments
Virtual reality sword combat programs give students the opportunity to participate in an otherwise high-cost and dangerous activity.
Problem to be Solved: Students cannot participate in valuable educational experiences due to cost, travel, or potential danger.
Imperial College London developed the CREATE lab to allow chemical engineering students to remotely control teaching assistants and students to conduct experiments on working machines and rigs. Microsoft HoloLens are used to stream images live to remote students who provide directions to lab workers, both verbally and in writing. Students can also access controllable cameras to zoom in on and see experiments from different angles. Students can even scan QR codes to access additional information about experiments.
Imperial’s chemical engineering department developed the solution when Covid-19 forced instruction online because they knew they needed to find a way to give the department’s 600 students practical experience in the lab.
Virtual Reality Sword Combat
Remote lab experiments conducted through augmented reality headsets allow students to conduct lab experiments remotely through physically present colleagues.
Problem to be Solved: Students cannot participate in valuable educational experiences due to cost, travel, or potential danger.
Southern Methodist University developed a VR sword combat program because a faculty member wanted to introduce classes on sword combat, but the associated risks were a barrier to creating interactive experiences. Thus, IT staff and faculty members collaborated closely to tailor the digital VR solution to the course.
Facilities/Estates
High Scale of Impact
People Counters
Metering devices like people counters count and track space occupancy as well as transmit data in real-time that can be analysed later. People counters reduce energy costs and inform prioritization decisions for space upgrades.
Problem to be Solved: Institutions do not have accurate space occupancy data to make informed space planning and allocation decisions or to efficiently regulate heating and cooling.
The University of Alberta installed 300 thermal people counters in rooms across campus. Thermal people counters enabled Alberta to adjust HVAC in real-time and make more informed decisions about classroom upgrades and decommissioning based on occupancy. Counters also provided more accurate utilization data that helped Alberta make academic space planning and budget incentives decisions.
Alberta spent C$8,215 to install people counters per room, but the counters returned C$2,000 in custodial and HVAC savings per room per term. People counters paid for themselves in savings in 2.56 years.
Medium Scale of Impact
Point-of-Service Call Buttons
Internet of Things call buttons let patrons signal to appropriate personnel when facilities need service or attention. The wireless buttons are a low-cost measure that leverages patrons to surface facilities issues. Call buttons can also be used in other areas, such as for campus safety or in the library.
Problem to be Solved: Institutions struggle to identify and deploy support to facilities issues in a timely manner due to the number of assets they have.
Fresno State University distributed Amazon Web Service (AWS) buttons to patrons across campus to build a smart notification network. AWS Buttons are low-cost, programmable, Wi-Fi enabled input devices that automate a pre-defined action. Patrons can use Fresno State’s AWS buttons to signal to personnel when facilities need attention. For example, a bathroom user can press an AWS button to let custodians know that a restroom needs servicing. From September 2017 to May 2019, Fresno State responded to 867 button alerts from 129 AWS buttons across campus.
IoT-Triggered Waste Pickup
Internet of Things sensors alert campus personnel about waste levels and locations that need attention. The sensor alerts enable appropriate resourcing and deployment of staff to handle waste.
Problem to be Solved: College and university staff are not always aware when waste is piling up in bins and instead follow arbitrary schedules to check on waste accumulation.
The University of British Columbia places sensors on rubbish bins, which notify staff when weight or fill limits have been reached.
Student Support
High Scale of Impact
Mobile Mental Health Self-Evaluation
Social platforms providing mental health screenings deliver agile and effective at-scale mental health services.
Problem to be Solved: Institutions are ill-equipped to meet rising demand for mental health counselling services, meaning students suffer long waits for service.
Colorado State University provides mental health micro-assessments on its YOU@CSU platform. CSU rotates pulse questions across the student body and targets at-risk groups with personalized content and counseling referrals based on responses.
CSU has administered 20K quizzes and students have clicked on mental and physical health content 55K times. 76% of students have credited CSU for proactively helping to manage stress.
Conversational AI Concierge
A smartphone enabled, personal student AI assistant answers student questions and provides students personalized service (e.g., help finding library books for a research project) and reminders (e.g., assignment due dates, extracurricular events).
Problem to be Solved: Students are discouraged from seeking help because they often do not know where to direct questions, are hassled by clunky support services, and want to avoid frustrating phone calls.
Deakin University developed the “Genie” personal AI assistant to perform a variety of tasks to support students, from reminding students when assignments are due to connecting students with the appropriate campus contact if they need help with a class project. Deakin partnered with IBM Watson to develop their Genie over the course of six years. Genie was launched in 2016 and as of 2019, had answered over 55,000 question. Deakin also boasts a 6,000+ question bank for Genie to pull from.
Medium Scale of Impact
University-Branded Smart Speaker Digital Assistants
Smart speakers programmed to answer campus questions offer on-demand information about campus events and services. Institutions create answer banks for smart speakers to source responses from.
Problem to be Solved: Students are discouraged from seeking help because they often do not know where to direct questions, are hassled by clunky support services, and want to avoid frustrating phone calls.
Saint Louis University purchased and placed 2,300 Amazon Echo in students’ dorm rooms. The Dots are loaded with the voice app SLU, which contains answers to 130 and counting campus-related questions. SLU developed the skill with the vendor n-Powered. The speakers provide a variety of services, from smart scheduling tools to nudging students towards mobile digital learning resources.
Automated Mail Collection Through Bluetooth-Activated Lockers
Automated locker systems and package tracking software provide quicker customer service and require less staff capacity to operate.
Problem to be Solved: Campus mailrooms struggle to sort and disburse mail and packages in a timely manner; students begroan package delays in the mailroom.
Gonzaga University invested in automated lockers and packaging and tracking software that was compatible with their ERP. Gonzaga also partnered with SCLogic and TZ Lockers to implement automated mail collection. The system notifies students of package delivery and allows them to pick up packages using ID cards or a mobile app.
Blockchain Self-Service Transcript Access
A blockchain, open-source platform to record digital diplomas gives students greater ownership of their degrees and speeds up a traditionally cumbersome process.
Problem to be Solved: Students are frustrated by unwieldy and time-consuming process to obtain copies of their diplomas for employers.
Central New Mexico Community College partnered with the vendor Learning Machine to develop its tamper-proof, digital diplomas. When students complete a degree or certificate, they receive an automated email with instructions for downloading and storing credentials. Students can then share one-time verified credentials directly with employers via social media or email.
Smart Scheduling Tools
Smart schedules sync academic and co-curricular events to student information and registration systems. These smart schedules reduce registration times, dropped courses, and unneeded credits They also boosts graduation rates.
Problem to be Solved: Students struggle to juggle academic courses and extracurricular activities – especially when it comes time to registering for courses.
North Carolina State University’s Enrollment Wizard combines students’ term schedules and personal calendars into one offering. Students can use the Enrollment Wizard to perform both degree audits and registration, which are sortable by time and seat availability. The Enrollment Wizard requires upkeep of course pathways and co-curricular schedules. A split screen imports students’ personal calendar and filters out modules conflicting with work, sports, and clubs.
Student Geolocator Prompts
A wayfinding app offering personalized smart campus navigation provides students tailored navigation of services on campus.
Problem to be Solved: Students, especially new admits, find navigating campus difficult.
Deakin University introduced Scout, its smart wayfinding app, in 2017. Scout uses GeoSensor networks and students’ personal information to provide location-based support and help students navigate Deakin’s large, complex campus using their mobile phones. For example, students can search for a service or room in the app, and the app will provide them with step-by-step directions to their location. Scout even provides internal directions within buildings. Scout also lets students check to see how busy spaces like the library are. Students can personalize Scout to send push notifications with offerings based on when they pass or enter certain areas on campus (e.g., notifications of coffee deals when students walk past the café). Over 25K students have downloaded the app in its first five years.
Student Voices Platform
Online student voice boards empower students and enable institutions to quickly identify and address campus issues. Students can voice comments ranging from course reviews to social issues and movements on campus.
Problem to be Solved: Institutions are slow to both surface and address issues raised by students. Students lack a convenient and widespread forum where they can voice and discuss campus issues with one another in real-time.
Swansea University developed Unitu, a student platform that combines social and workflow features. Students can post course-specific comments while peers can “like” and comment on posts providing real-time insight into student sentiment and intensity. Student representatives can curate issues, escalating popular posts for university-wide follow-up. Feedback provided in the platform prompted the university to invest in green transport and mental health programs.
Low Scale of Impact
Service Delivery Robots
Robots that deliver food anywhere on campus provide next-level student service.
Problem to be Solved: Students expect Uber Eats-like food delivery service, which campuses struggle to deliver.
George Mason University introduced 32 food delivery robots serving 10 retail locations in 2019. In the first year, the GMU campus placed more than 10K orders and retail sales grew by over $1M. Robots can typically carry up to 10 kg of food and open with personalized codes.
Operations
High Scale of Impact
Natural Language Processing-Powered Help Desk
Automated natural language processing help desks triage tickets rapidly and consistently. These help desks help ensure that customers are promptly directed to the proper channels to address tickets.
Problem to be Solved: Manual and inconsistent help desk triaging hurts service quality and the customer experience.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) instituted a processing algorithm which optimized classification and assignment of tickets. WPI used 100K historical tickets to solve future requests and improve the IT support triaging process. The algorithm resulted in an approximately 80% success rate in first-technician resolution and saved WPI 3K hours.
Robotic Process Automation
Robotic process automation (RPA) can perform high-volume, repeatable tasks to free up staff capacity for more high-value, strategic work.
Problem to be Solved: Valuable staff time is coopted by manual, low-value tasks instead of more strategic work.
The University of Melbourne automated 22 processes with RPA in areas such as student admissions, data entry, and financial management by working with the vendor and enterprise RPA platform Automation Anywhere. For example, RPA is now used to collate and enter student exam data into the enrollment system, replacing the need for additional data entry staff. Other sample RPA applications include automating the upload of student documents to reconciling employee IDs across multiple HR systems. RPA-automated processes now save the University of Melbourne 10K hours of labor annually.
Self-Service Business-Intelligence Analytics
Self-service business intelligence platforms house all university data in a central location and provide users ready-made offerings such as reports and charts to empower them to make data-informed decisions.
Problem to be Solved: Staff seldom make data-informed decisions because institutional data is not readily accessible or interpretable.
University of California, Berkeley built its own self-service business intelligence platform, Cal Answers. This platform centralized all university data in one location, is accessible to the campus community, and contains premade reports and data visualization to support common tasks and answer one-off inquiries. For example, Cal Answers can help a user research graduation rates or help units develop budgets. It pulls from nine data sources (e.g., ERP, SIS) and provides seven years of historical data.
Medium Scale of Impact
Smart IT Service Desk
Smart service desks triage students more quickly and track issue types to minimize the effort students must expend to receive IT help and improve institutional service planning.
Problem to be Solved: Traditional service desk wait times are long and unpredictable.
Marshall University built a smart IT service desk solution to address long wait times that traditionally discouraged students from seeking help. The new service desks let students sign in on tablets using their ID cards, present students a queue spot number and estimated wait time, offer alternative times for service, and send automatic calendar invites. The desks enhance institutional capabilities by tracking the type and frequency of student IT queries, optimizing IT help time, and minimizing long lines. Tap-commands and list prioritization also reduce user abandonment and increase data capture for IT. Smart IT service desks at Marshall University report around 700 interactions per month per location.
Student Course Demand Dashboards
Course demand dashboards map registration data to class capacity. Dashboards help students navigate course selection and create realistic timelines for degree completion. Dashboards also inform advisor and administrator decision making. For example, administrators can use dashboards to optimize schedules.
Problem to be Solved: Students cannot properly plan academic careers because they do not know which classes will reach capacity before they can register.
The University of Washington (UW) developed dashboards to measure student demand using two campus data sets: actual course registration numbers and students who have signed up for alerts for specific classes, which serves as a proxy for student interest. Together, these dashboards allow advisors to assess the likelihood that a student can enroll in a class and provide administrators insight into resource allocation decisions. In its first year, over 100 users utilized the course demand dashboards.
Low Scale of Impact
Location-Service Enabled Real-Time Population Density Maps
Apps providing real-time population density of areas like libraries and dining halls help students navigate popular campus spaces.
Problem to be Solved: Students cannot find places to study or eat in busy libraries or dining halls.
University of California San Diego students created the mobile solution Waitz to map student locations in 2017. The app counts the number of nearby cell phone signals to calculate the population density of an area and shares information about available space with users. After a year of deployment, 25% of UCSD students had downloaded Waitz. The service now sees 1500+ users weekly.
This resource requires EAB partnership access to view.
Access the tool
Learn how you can get access to this resource as well as hands-on support from our experts through IT Strategy Advisory Services.
Learn More