Colorado State Offers 'Green' Learning with Anywhere, Anytime
All higher education institutions want to see students flourish. Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, Colorado, has taken steps to increase student success — particularly among engineering students — through its new Academic Village, a facility that combines living and learning into a single community.
Designed with input from students about campus life and "green" building techniques, the CSU Academic Village features a new network of Sun Ray 2FS virtual display clients that gives engineering students instant access to their desktop environments from anywhere, at any time, with increased security and lower energy requirements. |
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"Always-On" Network Plays Key Role in University's Retention Plan
Colorado State University is a leader in creating sustainability efforts on campus as well as developing clean energy solutions that directly help people across the globe. CSU is one of the leading research universities in the U.S., with nearly $300 million in annual research expenditures. Its new Academic Village aims to increase the university's ability to recruit technically savvy high school students while decreasing the dropout rate among first-year engineering students.
Jim Dolak, executive director of Housing and Dining Services, hopes that bringing living and learning together will help students thrive academically. The university's comprehensive retention plan focuses on improving the quality of the undergraduate experience at Colorado State for all students so that they will remain in school and graduate. Core to this plan are Living Learning Communities that allow students to quickly develop a sense of community.
"Students seem to be more successful when academics and living are integrated," Dolak said.
The new Academic Village includes residence halls that will house about 420 students from the College of Engineering and the honors program. The Engineering Living Learning Community has multipurpose rooms, study lounges, electronic classrooms, and design studios. To address students' expectations for online, ubiquitous access to their course content and work, CSU has armed each engineering student dorm room with a Sun Ray 2FS thin client running the Solaris 10 Operating System.
The new engineering community also houses team labs set up for eight students with eight Sun Ray clients in each lab, and a multimedia classroom with 35 Sun Ray clients. In addition, approximately 120 Sun Ray kiosks are scattered across the CSU campus, so that no matter where they are, students can access their classwork and the Internet.
Students simply insert a smart card into any Sun Ray thin client and their entire desktop environment will appear.
Sun Ray Thin Clients Secure the Desktop While Saving Money, Energy
A key benefit of the Sun Ray clients is heightened security. A Sun Ray client contains no resident operating system or applications, which makes it virtually immune to viruses and service attacks. And, because a Sun Ray client doesn't contain a disk drive or any means of persistent data storage, it's an unattractive target for theft. All of the data and applications displayed on-screen disappear the instant the client is turned off or the access card is removed.
The Sun Ray clients also integrate better into the university's eco-responsibility policies around sustainability, as exemplified by its Live Green program. In fact, CSU was one of the first universities in the U.S. to offer on-campus residents the option to purchase green power for their residence hall rooms or university apartments. The university purchased approximately 3 million kWh of renewable energy for the 2007/2008 academic year for all public areas.
But saving energy also has a practical benefit. Like all educational institutions today, Colorado State University has to cope with rising electricity rates. Thus, the Sun Ray solution was a perfect fit from both an ecological and an economic standpoint. A typical Sun Ray system operates on just 7.86 watts, compared to 80 watts or more for the average PC, saving significant power costs. Sun Ray also integrate better into the university environment because they emit less heat and are quieter than PCs, a boon to students prepping for exams and writing papers.
Reduced Time and Cost for IT Administrators
With Sun Ray 2FS thin clients, CSU can now easily deploy the applications students need to complete their coursework. With Sun Ray 2FS thin clients, CSU can now easily deploy the applications students need to complete their coursework. These tools include Web tools that not only deliver on the promise of anytime, anywhere learning but can decrease the amount of time it takes to get to the information, allowing students to complete their coursework faster.
Jered Lish, a speech communication major, will be a resident assistant in the Academic Village this fall. He chose to live in the Academic Village because of the opportunities it presented.
"Colorado State is committed to academics, and it is quite obvious through the Academic Village that the university wants to create an atmosphere that is focused on students succeeding academically," Lish said. "Who wouldn't want to be a part of that?"
Sun Ray Technologies, Colorado State Offers 'Green' Learning with Anywhere, Anytime,http://www.sun.com/emrkt/educonnection/newsletter/0308eduinaction.html |
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