Dive Brief:
- Higher ed institutions are applying drones for a variety of uses on their campuses. In addition to offering students educational opportunities in drone design, usage and maintenance, schools are using drones for marketing purposes, and even to assist in safety and security. Some southern colleges mapped hurricane damage to their campuses in the aftermath of the storms that hit the country this summer.
- Colleges and universities must strike a balance between promoting drone usage on campus, including for research purposes, and abiding by increasingly stringent Federal Aviation Administration regulations, especially in a situation where drones are being used for personal, commercial, research and security purposes.
- Some universities, like the University of Alabama in Huntsville, are using drones to map campus grounds efficiently, while other institutions are using the unmanned vehicles to track traffic after football games or other highly-attended campus events. The University of Illinois is using drones to map the progress and safety of high-profile construction projects, matching the site to design plans.
Dive Insight:
College administrators must also support the staff and resources to make sure the machines are secure from hacking or other kinds of misuse. Work by a team at John Hopkins University last year found that drones could be susceptible to forms of hacking which could crash the instrument, raising a variety of concerns for the security of students, college facilities and the drone, which is in itself an investment by the school. Cybersecurity increasingly concerns college administrators who feel uncertain about the security of their network, and if there is going to be a multitude of drones on campus, schools must ensure they have the right kind of IT staff available to safeguard such instruments under the institution's care.