| | June - July8IN MY OPINIONTransforming Education with Mobile LearningBy James Tagliareni, Chief Information Officer, Washburn UniversityW hen I joined the College of the Mainland as CIO two years ago, one of my first priorities was to create a mobile campus, so students and faculty can take advantage of mobile devices and wireless technology inside and outside their classrooms.Upon my arrival, most of the campus technology was either at the end of life, obsolete or just not up to standards. Desktop computers were between eight to 11 years old and extremely slow, taking three to five minutes to boot. The aging network infrastructure was also slow and the Wi-Fi coverage was spotty. We were the technological equivalent of being in the Dark Ages.Thanks to the backing of our president, Dr. Beth Lewis, and the Board of Trustees, my IT team and I quickly launched multiple technology upgrade projects to bring the campus up to speed and provide our faculty, staff and students the state-of-the-art technology they deserve. Now two years later, our campus community has high-speed wireless Internet access throughout every campus building, including the outdoors. Students and faculty can access all the educational applications they need anytime, anywhere and on any device, whether they're walking across campus with a smartphone or tablet in hand or using a laptop in class from one of our new mobile computing labs. In this column, I'll highlight the technologies that we've implemented ­ and still plan to implement ­ to enable mobile learning on campus. The first step, however, was to build the foundation, and that required us to overhaul the network infrastructure and install a new wireless network.Building a Blazing Fast NetworkThe previous network on the main campus would slow to a crawl by mid-morning when the campus filled up with several thousand students, faculty and staff. The network was made up of a patchwork of 3Com, HP and Cisco 100 Mbps switches that were at least a decade old, maybe older. We had Wi-Fi in each building, but it was also old and slow. Making matters worse was that our Internet service provider at the time provided only 50Mbps speeds, which is slower than the connection I have at home. In late 2014, my IT team and I installed redundant Cisco switches that provided 10Gbps speeds at the core and new Cisco switches providing 1Gbps speeds at the network edge. And in early 2015, we installed 120 high-speed and high-density Cisco Meraki 802.11ac access points to provide full wireless coverage and gigabit wireless speeds in all campus buildings.We also added access points outdoors, so students could walk from building to building and not lose connection, and so they can congregate with their classmates in our open spaces and study. To top it off, we switched service providers and increased our Internet bandwidth from 50Mbps to 250Mbps, a five-fold increase. Network bottlenecks are now a thing of the past. The faster, more reliable network, combined with a stronger Wi-Fi network and faster Internet speeds, provides our campus community with plenty of bandwidth to watch iTunes U content, stream video and access educational applications or large files. New Mobile and Wireless TechnologiesWith the network and Wi-Fi network upgrades complete, my team and I have invested in new mobile and wireless technologies to support our digital learning efforts and to increase the use of technology in our classrooms. Some highlights, include:Mobile Laptop and Apple iPad Carts. We're investing in mobile computing labs, so faculty can have their students collaborate on projects and do research in class. So far, we've purchased six mobile laptop carts, each featuring 30 notebook computers. We've also purchased one iPad cart with 30 iPad 2 tablets. And we plan to buy more in the future.
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