Students’ mobile phones can function as ID cards, digital wallets, and appointment managers; they can also provide credentialing, offer a check-in function, track declining balance accounts, and more. With these and other capabilities in one place—often within a single app—the campus experience becomes unified and convenient as students perform many tasks that used to require in-person interactions across campus quickly and without friction
Streamlined ID management systems provide powerful features that reduce the burdens on staff in the card office and elsewhere on campus. From printing cards to taking ID photos, manual and time-intensive office work transitions to online, digital automations managed anytime, anywhere. Hosted and cloud solutions can further reduce responsibilities of campus IT personnel, providing an integrated computing environment that improves staff communication, increases process coordination and automation, and facilitates data-sharing amongst offices.
Mobile Phones
With the newest technology, mobile IDs can perform the same traditional tasks previously done with physical ID cards. These cards allow students to better manage their on-campus life and—often—bypass in-person visits for faster, safer access to campus services.
Mobile phones can leverage wireless technologies to perform a number of tasks with speed and ease. Near Field Communication (NFC), Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi interfaces allow phones to communicate with technology embedded across campus. With phone in hand, students can conveniently check into class, get on campus buses, access doors and buildings, and purchase tickets to attend events.
Mobile phones can also take advantage of mobile wallets and related solutions. Students can manage payments, refunds, and other financial activities via the student account. They can also utilize closed-loop, declining balance accounts for campus purchases like printing, books, vending, parking, laundry, and more. Phone apps can schedule appointments with academic advisors, reserve dining hall tables, and more.
With all of the functions in one place, students have a single sign-on rather than logging into multiple systems, and multi-factor authentication strengthens the security of signing in. Additionally, while physical ID cards are frequently lost, students are much less likely to forget their phones.
For staff, mobile IDs can mean no longer printing physical ID cards and paper tickets for events, saving time and money in production costs and staffing for face-to-face business. Even further, students submit ID photos and manage their accounts through their phones, and staff members can provision the IDs, manage permissions, and more from any location, reducing the staff required, the need for extended office hours, and the numbers of students waiting in long lines for their IDs. Staff can also reach students with messaging they are less likely to ignore, via notifications and alerts on their phones, thereby improving campus communication and student engagement and success.
Hosted and Cloud Services
Moving ID management systems from on-premises to hosted and cloud environments reduces costs, decreases IT demands, and streamlines the management of traditional permissions, privileges, and authorization processes. Hosted and cloud computing trims on-campus resource requirements, especially purchasing, implementing, maintaining, and upgrading servers and related infrastructure. In addition to decreasing capital expenditures, IT staff have reduced responsibilities for managing databases, securing data centers, maintaining servers, and performing network oversight. Campus IT then has more capacity to focus on value-added work and critical projects.
(Please use this as a pull quote) By digitizing the campus ID, running it in a hosted and cloud environment, and connecting it to payments, access, and administrative solutions that integrate across campus, dozens of tasks are streamlined and automated.
Hosted and cloud environments provide a bevy of tech benefits. They are flexible and can be fitted to every situation, saving the campus money by purchasing only what is needed and having it configured to the specific needs. But as circumstances change, hosted solutions are built to expand, contract, and reshape more easily and quickly than on-premises software. Hosted and cloud server architecture has built-in redundancy and disaster prevention measures to keep data safe and make recovery fast. It also increases reliability, with more uptime for user satisfaction and less downtime with its costs and headaches. Updates are more smoothly implemented, and the system accrues less technical debt since it runs the most recent version with the latest upgrades. Hosted and cloud providers usually offer access to test environments in which users can experiment and develop solutions focused on improving performance.
The Power of Integration and Data
An important aspect of cloud and hosted environments is the integration of solutions and hardware. Rather than legacy solutions that don’t connect, the components of hosted and cloud ID management systems communicate with each other. This integration improves the creation, unification, and communication of data by turning the arduous, manual work of collecting, analyzing, and sharing data into an automated, real-time process of data analytics.
Integrated campus ID solutions generate usable data from every activity they’re involved in, which for mobile IDs includes everything from entering buildings and attending class to making purchases and riding campus buses. This data was previously inaccessible to administrators. Data from integrated systems will not just gather data points from student activities that use mobile IDs across the entire campus, but also make connections between them to help administrators detect patterns that lead to actionable insights. Data analytics are presented in dashboards and digestible reports that are delivered in near real time as data continuously synchronizes across the integrations.
Individual offices like dining services can observe dining hall data to optimize schedules, services, and ordering. But administrators can also synthesize data from multiple sources—dorms, events, classrooms, service offices, and more—to paint a larger picture of the students’ habits and well-being. Problem indicators can be detected, and staff can provide timely help to keep at-risk students safe, enrolled, and successfully progressing toward graduation.
Integration also allows for real-time monitoring of the ID system, remote administration, and immediate decisions on access. A lone administrator, working from anywhere, can use a web-based program to quickly lock doors across campus, change permissions and credentials status for any user, and communicate essential information to the entire campus community, such as safety warnings or inclement weather delays.
Transforming IDs
By digitizing the campus ID, running it in a hosted and cloud environment, and connecting it to payments, access, and administrative solutions that integrate across campus, dozens of tasks are streamlined and automated. From making payments to scheduling advising appointments, students can save time and effort by accomplishing their to-do lists quickly via their phones. Staff can eliminate labor-intensive work and take advantage of the power of modern solutions to more easily and quickly control access, generate and share data, and coordinate with other offices, from dining services and academic advising to the gym and the library.
According to the National Association of Campus Card Users (NACCU) Benchmarking Survey 2020, 70% of surveyed higher education institutions do not have mobile credentials, 60% do not have mobile payments, and 69% lack event access. This situation offers a fantastic opportunity to invigorate campus operations and the student experience with the powerful, multi-functional capabilities of ID management systems that rely on mobile phones, hosted and cloud computing, and integrated solutions.
