Student engagement & experience enhanced at UNCW with digital signage deployment.
UNCW was founded in 1947 by New Hanover County leaders and citizens to enhance the quality of education and life opportunities for students. The campus is one of seventeen institutions in North Carolina System with over 18,000 students.
A campus of this caliber needed a reliable and scalable digital signage solution that could aid in creating seamless cross-departmental communication to help engage and inform students, staff, and visitors across the campus, and one which could be managed centrally.
Furthermore, as the college extended its footprint of digital signage displays across campus, having a solution that was scalable, as well as secure, was becoming even more essential. Whilst there had been a system in place previously, it did not offer the scalability needed and had become time and resource intensive to manage and maintain.
One unique application where we are using the SOC solution is our shuttle bus terminal. All the buses have GPS trackers, and the displays show a real-time map of campus and the surrounding area so students can see exactly where their shuttles are.
Robb Mann
Cross Campus Deployment
Following an extensive period of evaluation, UNCW chose to work with Tripleplay, selecting the ONELAN Digital Signage platform as it was easy to use-to-use, could be managed remotely, and required minimal hands-on management for the on-campus staff. Importantly, it also offered much-needed scalability.
Numerous displays were installed across the campus at strategic locations in areas of high footfall, ensuring maximum content visibility, with the installation base rapidly increasing from the original 25 to an estate of over 150 displays.
The installation also included the deployment of a System-on-Chip (SOC) solution for the outdoor displays where the requirement for a physical player is removed. The North Carolina climate can be hot and humid during the summer months and the SOC solution avoids the need to secure and cool a media player, ensuring signage can be deployed securely and with elevated levels of resilience all year round.
Convenient Content Personalization
One of the key features that the college uses is the ability to manage several diverse types of content across different departments. This includes school-wide events, donor acknowledgments, student presentations, and department-specified communications, which can switch as frequently as needed with a few simple mouse clicks.
To provide tailored communications, departments can customize their own content whether that is using the standard templates, including videos or RSS feeds for example, or creating their own formats from scratch. All the content is managed centrally from a simple, web-based interface.
Robb Mann, Manager, Integrated Educational Technologies from UNCW shared, “The experience of working with Tripleplay has been excellent and having ONELAN as our campus solution truly helped to ensure our university communications runs smoothly from a single remote system which is easy to scale.”
The internal response has been nothing but positive and our staff has been on board with the integration since the first deployment. Students, the IT administration, and staff are even more engaged and directly benefit from being able to easily view campus or departmental specific messaging
Robb Mann
Continued 24/7 Support
The college has been able to take advantage of Tripleplay’s 24/7 global support, providing excellent support and peace of mind to end users, who benefit from an exclusive service from experienced, highly trained agents.
“The responsiveness of the Tripleplay team is like no other,” enthused Mann. “When we recently hit a limit on our campus-wide channel system, they rapidly resolved this for us. It gives us huge confidence in not only the platform but also the organization.”
UNCW future plans include expansion of the deployment and ensuring departmental teams fully leverage the full capabilities of the system, scaling adoption even more widely across the campus and maximizing the benefits of the platform to increase student, staff, and visitor engagement.