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Digital Signage
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4/1/2007
Send those flyers to the recycle bin: There’s a whole new way to communicate news and information to students and other campus members.
IF THE PURPOSE of a business school is to prepare its students
for real-world commercial environments and scenarios,
then the College of Business Administration at Creighton University
(NE) is doing its scholars proud. The college, which has
close to 900 students and provides instruction in everything from
economics and finance to entrepreneurship and marketing,
recently installed four 40-inch liquid crystal display (LCD)
screens from NEC, in prominent areas of its
main facility. The goal: to make campus information and news from Wall
Street more accessible on a regular basis.
With the help of solution provider Rise Vision, the school installed the displays in two of the college’s busiest areas: Two of the monitors are mounted to the ceiling of a high-traffic hallway, and the others are mounted side-by-side in the main entryway, in a custom wooden enclosure (the entryway displays are controlled as one large presentation, allowing scrolling tickers to flow from one screen to the next). Anthony Hendrickson, dean of the college, says the screens provide news, weather, and market updates to students as they move between classes, revolutionizing the way the school communicates with students overall.
“Before we went to digital displays, we had no means of sharing market information, and we used e-mail and the web for the dissemination of campus events and activities,” he says. Hendrickson adds that because of the way the displays publish information on the interface, “there is clearly energy and excitement surrounding them.”
CREIGHTON'S DIGITAL DISPLAYS are revolutionizing the way the school communicates with students.
That energy and excitement is spreading rapidly these days, as dozens of schools are re-architecting on-campus communication strategies around a similar technology. Insiders call the approach “digital signage,” and hail it as the future of communication. Logistically speaking, the technology mixes LCD hardware with software that facilitates updates over existing IP communications networks. From a practical perspective, it enables users to be better informed, and allows school officials to deliver information more quickly than ever before.
Across the country, these implementations
have taken a variety of forms.
Schools such as Bryant University (RI),
the
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