Laptops replacing Labs - another view
At BVU the answer is an emphatic YES! On our Storm Lake campus we provide all of our undergraduate students and faculty with wireless-enabled laptop computers. Our wireless network is ubiquitous - and has been since August of 2000.Prior to launching our eBVyou wireless laptop initiative in the fall of 2000 we had approximately 200 desktop computers spread across 5 public labs plus nearly 100 networked desktop computers in the residence halls in lounge areas. Our student/computer ratio was 4.1 students per public PC (counting the residence hall PCs.) Late each semester not only were the labs fully utilized, but students would roam from residence hall to residence hall seeking out a computer to work on.
Now we have at total of just 34 public access PCs in three locations. Twenty-four of these are in our library in order to provide convenience for our undergrads, public research access, K-12 groups, and access for community college students. In the last case, we have a center at the community college's main campus in another city and they grant reciprocal access for our students to their library and computer labs. Four of the computers are top-end Macintosh systems in our media studies lab, down from 14 units and now sitting next to docking stations for our laptops that enable them to hook into large displays, scanners and other peripherals. The remaining 6 units are in a Science lab and the original idea was to enable access to Mathematica. However, my understanding is that the Science faculty have since changed over to running Mathematica on a Solaris or Linux server and granting their students accounts on that server. (Enabling students access to Mathematica from anywhere on campus.) At the end of last year, most of the science lab computers had been repurposed into nodes in a Beowulf system. Most of our lab computers get very light use. Our students use their laptops.
We license Microsoft software through their Campus Agreement at approximately $20 per student per year. We license Novell Netware and GroupWise on the same basis. In some cases, course-specific software may be included with textbooks. Specialized software is provided either via simultaneous-user licenses (50 simultaneous for SPSS) or a charge (essentially a textbook fee) for our media studies students to license things like the Adobe CreativeSuite. We manage installations through the Help Desk. There are also approaches like terminal services that I know others are using, but are not currently using those approaches to providing access to specialized software applications.
The money saved on computer labs has been directed into the eBVyou program, initially funding infrastructure enhancements.
The fact that most computers on our campus are now single-user rather than shared-use computers has made keeping working computers available to each student much, much easier.
Ken Clipperton
Managing Director of University Information Services
Buena Vista University
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