iPads for incoming students

Sali,

I assume my question will be unpopular and I really am not trying to start an argument, but I’m curious what your goal is when you could provide an actual computer to every student for the same cost.

Brien Muller

IT Help Desk Manager

Skidmore College

We were also tasked with looking at a similar initiative, and started looking at it just prior to the iPad2 coming out, except at that point it was a mobile initiative.  The first step was buying a device of each type of “tablet” that was available and allowing a few faculty to demo them and see if they were usable in the classroom and how they would be used. At that point in time we bought 2 ipad 1s, a Xoom, a BB Playbook, and 2 Dell Duos.

3 faculty then made the decision to move forward with a pilot project where they would teach classes with the devices. 1 chemistry class and 2 education classes where chosen. The chemistry professor choose a Dell Duo as his device of choose, the education professors wanted Ipads. Each class was limited to a class size of 20 so 20 Duos and 40 Ipad2s where purchased. For the past year each semester during each semester the devices were signed out to the students in those classes and then returned at the end of the year. Generally this has worked ok for these very select classes. We initially had some issues with over subscription of wireless infrastructure in locations where classes meet because we are designed around maximizing coverage not throughput, adding Aps has resolved this.

Regarding the future plans based on this test it was determined that it would not be feasible to hand a device to students for both financial and academic reasons. Financially, even when starting out giving all freshman and faculty devices then progress through as classes leave we would be spending approximately 1 million a year in new devices on a 3 year refresh cycle.

The 2^nd issue was no one could agree on one device, because certain departments said that apps weren’t available or didn’t work well for what they needed on other devices.  Then if a person had to cross departments, for example a chemistry teacher, they would need 2 different devices.  In addition, trying to get the faculty to commit to reworking curriculum to fully utilize the devices would have had a tepid response at best.

This was all before any additional support or wireless infrastructure costs that would need to be added and basically the numbers were already so large and with no justification of that much of an additional benefit to educational purposes we didn’t bother spending the time to do in depth research into these expenses.

The only potential justification that could be seen was if all faculty committed to eliminating books and essentially using the device to deliver rich media through a LMS of some type, or the new ibooks, then it would be reasonable to require students to purchase it instead of books and save money over the long term. The faculty didn’t like this idea.

That is our experience, hope it helps.