Dive Brief:
- Digital signs have powerful implications for colleges and universities that want to offer fresh, modern displays while also tracking student engagement, and a number of best practices can ensure institutions get it right.
- Campus Technology reports that the University of Michigan has found that marketing and IT collaboration creates the most effective digital signs, but important questions should be asked before signs go up — like whether users should be able to scroll through events or get more information by interacting with the sign, whether the sign looks touchable, and whether information should be made portable with a QR code.
- Additionally, all font, images, text alignment, and touchable elements on digital signs should be accessible and live data should be used to offer real-time content on digital signs — or, when it’s not, attention should be paid to keeping the content up-to-date.
Dive Insight:
One key piece of advice from the University of Michigan is to track results. Like virtually every new initiative on campus, administrators should be thinking about data. Digital signs offer opportunities to track student engagement and collect feedback through surveys. Levels of interaction can be analyzed to better determine what kind of sign content seems most popular in a given location. There is no end to the processes that can be improved with data analysis, and in many cases, the data is already being collected somewhere, it just needs to be parsed.
Colleges and universities have latched onto the idea of data analytics most consistently when it comes to student performance, where early-warning systems and other interventions can improve retention. Pulling together data from a student information system and learning management system is just the beginning. Many schools now add data from library and tutoring center check-ins and other parts of campus — data that exists in systems somewhere, but needs to be linked for predictive power.