HIGHER EDUCATION | BYOD SPECIAL
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ring your own: laptop, smartphone, tablet. Students and staff expect that they’ll be able to use their own tech on campus and
there have been pedagogic changes which make the use of personal technology more attractive for learning. One example of successful use is at the
University of Surrey. Since 2006 staff and students have been using an electronic voting system using clickers provided by the university library. A 2014 pilot of ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) aimed to offer an alternative electronic voting system to staff. The Polleverywhere system was chosen, enabling students to respond to questions via text message, web browser or app using their own devices. There was an overwhelmingly positive response: 87% of the 150 students surveyed preferred using their own personal device to vote, over the clickers. Following the pilot the University has
now purchased a year’s site license for the soſtware, which is available to all academics at Surrey – 80 of them have already signed up. The clicker system is still available to those who prefer this. Despite the obvious attraction,
universities who support bring your own device policies need to be aware of the infrastructure needed to support them. Tris Simmons, networking expert at NETGEAR says: “BYOD can present a number of security risks. A whole host of devices will be coming through the university doors, so a robust security solution to regulate and to protect the university’s data against today’s application, web, email and network threats is essential. Attacks can be prevented by using next generation application firewalls, in addition to anti-virus, anti-spam, web and email content filters.” Security access policies and other
measures can help universities control what students have access to. For example, institutions can prevent access to certain sites, put a limit on the amount of hours of access students have, or restrict the types of devices used by a unique MAC address. They might also choose to ask students to log into a central collaboration tool such as the Kramer VIA Collage. This provides a common platform for all those laptops, smartphones and tablets in real time on one digital canvas. Anybody who's logged in can help create and edit a common document through their individual devices and view what’s happening on the main display on their own device. Helen Beetham, higher education
consultant, together with David White, head of e-learning at University of the
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“Attacks can be prevented by using next generation application firewalls, in addition to anti-virus, anti-spam, web and email content filters”
Arts London, led a Jisc-funded project to look at students' experiences with digital technology, including how BYOD was working in universities. The work resulted in a series of use cases freely accessible at
http://digitalstudent.jiscinvolve.org/wp/ exemplars. Beetham says: “I think the challenges are around ensuring an equitable experience and getting students to engage with apps/services beyond those they already find familiar and easy to use.” One way to do this is to provide device- for-all schemes to make sure that less well-off
Main image: Bigstock
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