Private New York university chooses Google Apps to keep up with students' need for mobility and access.

The institution

With the exciting opportunities of New York City within an easy 25-mile reach, Hofstra University is continuously evolving and seeking new ways to give students the support and resources they need to reach the highest possible levels of achievement. At Hofstra, a dedicated faculty strives to ensure students succeed in their choice of more than 130 undergraduate and 140 graduate programs in liberal arts and sciences, business, communication, and education, as well as a School of Law. On October 16th 2007, the university announced that it will create a medical school in partnership with the North Shore – Long Island Jewish Health System of New York. Hofstra's 240-acre campus is home to approximately 4,000 resident students with a full-time enrollment of over 12,000 students in total.

Approach

While Hofstra's diverse mix of cultural, social, athletic, and recreational activities delivers a robust college experience, the school needed to add value to the technological services it provided to the campus community. "Historically, we've provided email services to all students, faculty, and staff, but our legacy system wasn't bringing much value to the learning environment any longer," says Director of Information Technology Planning, Roy Roberti.

Previously, each Hofstra student was issued only 100 MB of email storage, which didn't measure up to the expectations and demands of today's college student. In addition, the university did not provide email services to alumni, and was unable to easily maintain relationships with over 100,000 members of the school's extended family.

"The nature of college computing is rapidly changing," says Roberti. "Fixed site computers in labs and classrooms are de rigueur, but connectivity is the new 'must' in the lives of students weaned in a virtual world. The demands for mobility, the ability to access online resources anywhere, anytime is essential in supporting the academic success of today's students."

Increasingly, students at Hofstra are expected to complete coursework in teams, working collaboratively in an enriched learning environment on everything from case studies to economic modeling. Google Apps rapidly enables the kind of collaborative learning environment we need to provide today and far into the future. Explains Roberti, "We listened carefully to student advisory groups and set out to provide them with one-stop service to support a richer educational environment in classrooms, dorms, and for our growing community of mobile students."

Solution

Google Apps Education Edition caught Hofstra's attention as a way to provide greatly enhanced communication and collaboration services to students, while at the same time freeing the IT staff to better support Hofstra's broader educational goals. "We're interested in nurturing a long-term strategic relationship with Google to help us take campus computing to new levels. My colleagues at other educational institutions and I agree that Google has the understanding and infrastructure to supply software as a service to higher ed in ways that create computing environments in which institutions can thrive," says Roberti.

Having selected Google Apps Education Edition, Hofstra set out to make it as easy as possible to access the new services. All information is channeled through a central campus portal with single point of entry. Authentication is seamlessly integrated with Hofstra's pre-existing infrastructure so that students and alumni only need to enter a single user name and password. News, information, and data on the portal are tailored according to a users' status as student or alumni – creating a custom, yet cohesive online community. "Google worked closely with us to accommodate our goal of integrating Google Apps with our portal so that users only have to enter a user name and password once," recalls Roberti. "It's one more way we are facilitating easier access to a rich set of technology services. Furthermore, our transition from our legacy email system to Google Apps went so smoothly, there was literally no impact to our students. This was a critical factor in their overwhelming acceptance of the new Google services."

Prior to rolling out Google Apps to students and alumni, Hofstra launched a comprehensive marketing campaign that had the campus buzzing. Mysterious "G is Coming" t-shirts and signage were a big hit on campus. "The entire campus community responded positively to the fact that we were striving to provide the most innovative, relevant technology for the purposes of fostering academic excellence," says Roberti.

Results

Retiring the school's legacy email system has resulted in the ability to deploy greater resources to higher level IT issues, and has greatly improved the school's disaster recovery position because strategic systems like email are hosted off campus by Google. Gmail has become the mainstay email tool, with more than 100,000 accounts created. In terms of collaboration, student use of Google Docs is beginning to take hold, as faculty begin to incorporate the new capabilities into group-based assignments. Students are also working more effectively in teams using Google Talk for live chat and instant messaging, and Google Calendar to visibly share class schedules. "Overall, students feel they have been given something special," adds Roberti. "And now, faculty and staff are starting to ask: 'can we start using Google Apps?'"

About Google Apps Education Edition

Google Apps Education Edition is a free suite of hosted communication & collaboration applications designed for schools and universities. Google Apps includes Gmail (webmail services), Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Talk (instant messaging and voice over IP), Google Docs (online document creation & sharing) and a Start Page for creating a customizable homepage on a specific domain, as well as administrative tools, customer support, and access to APIs to integrate Google Apps with existing IT systems.



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