Leveraging student owned laptops on campus

Abstract

In 2003, the Help Desk at Integrated Technology Services (ITS) began receiving an increasing number of requests from students for laptop services and support. After surveying Canadian universities to see how they handled the issue (almost all recommended we stay out of the student laptop support business), we decided to move forward with a pilot project. The mandate of the pilot was to implement what services we could, within our budget, to encourage the use of student laptops on campus. This project supplemented, but did not replace, the existing support provided within the Residence system [4]. It also looked at ways to encourage students to use their own laptops instead of the lab computers funded by UNB. Funding for the pilot was obtained from the University's Student Technology Fee [5]. The funding covered the cost of a Computer Science Co-op student for each term of the year long project. These students, under the guidance of a full-time staff member, did research, developed a web site, made recommendations for the pilot project and provided the actual end user support.The pilot, added some services where were not previously provided to students, took advantage of initiatives that were already underway, and was careful not to duplicate the existing Residence IT support service. New services included a strong educational component promoted in one on one conversation with customers as well as through the new laptop support website. Regular laptop support hours at the ITS Help Desk and at the UNB Library located across campus were instituted. Additional new services included a web-based paid-as-you-go printing service that could be accessed from personal laptops. New laptop connection stations within existing computer labs were also added. Existing initiatives that were leveraged included a laptop registration service for our residence network that did preliminary checking of laptops for patches and virus prior to the laptop being allowed on the network, and a new about-to-be-introduced service which allowed web access to network drives. Because the UNB Residence system already had in place a personal computer support service for Residence students accessing the resident network, the pilot was careful not to duplicate this service. The laptop support service pilot was targeted to residence students wishing to use their laptop outside of the residence network and to providing non residence students help getting their personal laptops on the UNB network and with security issues such as operating system patching, virus protection and removal.