Mobilize Learning and Improve Student Retention by Providing Anywhere, Anytime Access from Any Device to Required Education Resources
Meeting Student and Staff Expectations
Enabling limitless learning is critical to attracting and engaging students and faculty in an era of increasing competition and unprecedented change in education practices. Whether learning takes place on a traditional campus or online, campus IT departments must provide students, faculty, and staff with always-on access to educational and work resources. End users expect it, and IT administrators must deliver.
The digital workspace is the defining model for end-user computing in the mobile cloud era, securely delivering anytime, anywhere access to any application from desktops, smartphones, and tablets. Institutions deploying the digital workspace can realize both education and revenue gains. User-centric digital workspaces remove barriers for students by ensuring that even the most demanding software can be accessed from almost any device, no matter how underpowered, while opening new sources of revenue and improving student retention for a university. The digital workspace helps campus IT succeed at getting technology out of the way, simplifying the delivery of education and keeping student needs front and center.
The digital workspace is inspired by consumer technology advances that end users use every day to enhance their mobile experiences. The end-user simple and enterprise-secure platform simplifies IT management while providing highly reliable access and protecting educational and business-critical applications that contain sensitive data. This notion of “consumer simple – enterprise secure” is a central pillar of the digital workspace for education.
The VMware Secure Digital Backpack
Every student can have one-touch single sign-on (SSO) access to all their education applications from any device they choose with VMware’s Secure Digital Backpack for Education, powered by VMware Workspace ONE™. The Digital Backpack integrates identity, application, and enterprise mobility management so IT teams can securely deliver and manage any application—SaaS, cloud-native, traditional and mobile—on any device. It improves education services delivery and makes learning from anywhere easy.
By 2020, one-quarter to one-third of higher education institutions will have committed to a student information system (SIS) replacement project.1 The VMware Connector for Ellucian ensures students’ digital backpacks stay up to date as they add and drop classes and from semester to semester. Leveraging the Workspace ONE and Ellucian SIS integration, IT can simply entitle software once, based on the courses offered—traditional or online. Every student’s digital workspace automatically stays current without manual updates or in-house development. VMware leverages the Ellucian Ethos Platform™ to integrate student and course information from Banner® by Ellucian and Colleague® by
Ellucian into VMware’s secure digital backpack technology, then delivers needed applications to end users based on the courses they choose. For students, digital backpacks provide a simple way to leverage whatever devices they choose to access the content they need, and know that everything is up to date. Students can work from anywhere with seamless access to educational resources as they move from one device to another and both on and off campus, improving collaboration and enjoying truly mobile learning and work.
Leverage the Power of BYO for Digital Curriculum Strategy
The reasons to implement bring-your-own device (BYOD) strategies in higher education are plentiful—from minimizing hardware and maintenance costs to preserving budget capital to increasing engagement because work is done on preferred devices and operating systems. Yet the reality of easily supporting the 3+ devices most student now bring to campus can be overwhelming for already budget-strained campus IT teams.
When advanced functionality is desired, the digital workspace includes enterprise mobility management features that secure and unify various devices and operating systems, simplifying the enrollment and delivery of content to different operating systems (e.g., Microsoft, iOS, MAC OS X, Android, etc.) and hundreds of different devices. The solution can push relevant and contextual messages, apps, and alerts to BYO devices from the console as well as notify users when their device is out of compliance and tell them how to fix it through a self-service process. Should a device go missing or be broken, IT can use the solution to easily wipe all its data remotely.
Enable High-Performance Computing On and Off Campus
In support of online and new education models, IT is tasked with evolving legacy apps and enabling the delivery of modern apps. VMware solutions simplify legacy app deployment and migration by isolating apps from underlying operating systems to eliminate conflict and streamline delivery and management. VMware investments in open source technologies such as Photon OS™ also enable academic institutions to securely build, run, and manage cloud-native apps on infrastructure as easily and cost effectively as legacy applications.
Across mobile devices, laptops, workstations and PCs, VMware virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) enables students, faculty, and staff, with a secure, consistent, high-performance (e.g., 2D and 3D graphics), highly available, and highly reliable computing environment while ensuring IT maintains centralized control over application and data access. VMware Horizon® both reduces IT operational expenses and speeds app delivery, lowering computing and storage costs, ensuring painless application packaging and installation, improving the consistency of operations, and strengthening data loss prevention.
Academic institutions can also use VMware solutions to streamline Windows 10 migration in campus business offices such as student services, campus security, financial aid and university development offices.
Learn More about VMware Digital Solutions for Higher Education
Digital workspace investment enables academic institutions—from community colleges to research universities—to introduce better ways of learning, new experiences, and inventive business models that drive successful outcomes. For students and educators that demand greater personalization and learning resources access, anytime, anywhere, on every device, IT innovation is critical. That’s why leading global academic institutions are deploying the comprehensive VMware portfolio of solutions.
VMware solutions help IT teams create exceptional mobile experiences for students, faculty, and staff by providing anytime, anywhere, any device access to data and information, improving learning engagement, faculty productivity, and overall educational success.
